Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
home in London; my second with my home in the country, and the
rejoicings for the termination of the Crimean War.
Under the date of May 29, 1856, we read in _Annals of Our Time_,
"Throughout the Kingdom, the day was marked by a cessation from work,
and, during the night, illuminations and fireworks were all but
universal." The banners and bands of the triumphal procession which
paraded the streets of our little town--scarcely more than a village in
dimensions--made as strong an impression on my mind as the conflagration
which had startled all London in the previous March.
People who have only known me as a double-dyed Londoner always seem to
find a difficulty in believing that I once was a countryman; yet, for
the first twenty-five years of my life, I lived almost entirely in the
country. "We could never have loved the earth so well, if we had had no
childhood in it--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up
again every spring, that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we
sat lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the
autumn hedgerows.... One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the
confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the
finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating
turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a Nursery-Gardener. And
there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that
it stirs an early memory--that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to
me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the
long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys
were vivid."
I had the unspeakable advantage of being reared in close contact with
Nature, in an aspect beautiful and wild. My father's house was
remarkable for its pretty garden, laid out with the old-fashioned
intricacy of pattern, and blazing, even into autumn, with varied colour.
In the midst of it, a large and absolutely symmetrical cedar "spread its
dark green layers of shade," and supplied us in summer with a kind of
_al fresco_ sitting-room. The background of the garden was formed by the
towering trees of Woburn Park; and close by there were great tracts of
woodland, which stretch far into Buckinghamshire, and have the character
and effect of virgin forest.
Having no boy-companions (for my only brother was ten years older than
myself), of course I played no games, except croquet. I was brought up
in a sporting home, my father being an enthusiastic fox-hunter and a
good all-round sportsman. I abhorred shooting, and was badly bored by
coursing and fishing. Indeed, I believe I can say with literal truth
that I have never killed anything larger than a wasp, and that only in
self-defence. But Woburn is an ideal country for riding, and I spent a
good deal of my time on an excellent pony, or more strictly, galloway.
An hour or two with the hounds was the reward of virtue in the
schoolroom; and cub-hunting in a woodland country at 7 o'clock on a
September morning still remains my most cherished memory of physical
enjoyment.
"That things are not as ill with you and me as they might have been is
half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and now
rest in unvisited tombs." Most true: and among that faithful number I
must remember our governess,--Catherine Emily Runciman--who devoted
forty years of her life, in one capacity or another, to us and to our
parents. She was what boys call "jolly out of school," but rather
despotic in it; and, after a few trials of strength, I was emancipated
from her control when I was eight. When we were in London for the
Session of Parliament, I attended a Day School, kept by two sisters of
John Leech, in a curious little cottage, since destroyed, at the bottom
of Lower Belgrave Street. Just at the age when, in the ordinary course,
I should have gone to a boarding-school, it was discovered that I was
physically unfit for the experiment; and then I had a series of tutors
at home. To one of these tutors my father wrote--"I must warn you of
your pupil's powers of conversation, and tact in leading his teachers
into it."
But I was to a great extent self-taught. We had an excellent, though
old-fashioned, library, and I spent a great deal of my time in
miscellaneous reading. The Waverley Novels gave me my first taste of
literary enjoyment, and _Pickwick_ (in the original green covers) came
soon after. Shakespeare and _Don Quixote_ were imposed by paternal
authority. Jeremy Taylor, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Dryden, Pope,
Byron, Moore, Macaulay, Miss Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, were among my
earliest friends, and I had an insatiable thirst for dictionaries and
encyclopaedias. Tennyson was the first poet whom I really loved, but I
also was fond of Scott's poetry, the _Lays of Ancient Rome_, the _Lays
of the Scottish Cavaliers_, and _The Golden Treasury_. Milton, Shelley,
Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold came later, but while I was still a boy.
George Eliot, Thackeray, Ruskin, and Trollope came when I was at Oxford;
and I am not sure that Browning ever came. On the whole, I owe my chief
enjoyment to Scott, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, and to _Pickwick_
more than to any single book. But I think the keenest thrill of
intellectual pleasure which I ever felt passed through me when, as a boy
at Harrow, I first read Wordsworth's "Daffodils."
Our home, in its outward aspects, was extremely bright and cheerful. We
had, as a family, a keen sense of fun, much contempt for convention, and
great fluency of speech; and our material surroundings were such as to
make life enjoyable. Even as a child, I used to say to myself, when
cantering among Scotch firs and rhododendrons, "The lines are fallen
unto me in pleasant places." A graver element was supplied by a good
deal of ill-health, by bereavements, and, in some sense, by our way of
religion. My home was intensely Evangelical, and I lived from my
earliest days in an atmosphere where the salvation of the individual
soul was the supreme and constant concern of life. No form of
worldliness entered into it, but it was full of good works, of social
service, and of practical labour for the poor. All life was lived, down
to its minutest detail, "as ever in the great task-Master's eye." From
our very earliest years we were taught the Bible, at first orally; and
later on were encouraged to read it, by gifts of handsomely bound
copies. I remember that our aids to study were Adam Clarke's Commentary,
Nicholl's _Help to Reading the Bible_, and a book called _Light in the
Dwelling_. Hymns played a great part in our training. As soon as we
could speak, we learned "When rising from the bed of death," and
"Beautiful Zion, built above." "Rock of Ages" and "Jesu, Lover of my
soul" were soon added. The Church Catechism we were never taught. I was
confirmed without learning it. It was said to be too difficult; it
really was too sacramental. By way of an easier exercise, I was
constrained to learn "The Shorter Catechism of the General Assembly of
Divines at Westminster." We had Family Prayers twice every day. My
father read a chapter, very much as the fancy took him, or where the
Bible opened of itself; and he read without note or comment. I recall a
very distinct impression on my infant mind that the passages of the Old
Testament which were read at prayers had no meaning, and that the public
reading of the words, without reference to sense, was an act of piety.
After the chapter, my father read one of Henry Thornton's Family
Prayers, replaced in later years by those of Ashton Oxenden.
While we were still very young children, we were carefully incited to
acts of practical charity. We began by carrying dinners to the sick and
aged poor; then we went on to reading hymns and bits of Bible to the
blind and unlettered. As soon as we were old enough, we became teachers
in Sunday schools, and conducted classes and cottage-meetings. From the
very beginning we were taught to save up our money for good causes. Each
of us had a "missionary box," and I remember another box, in the
counterfeit presentment of a Gothic church, which received contributions
for the Church Pastoral Aid Society. When, on an occasion of rare
dissipation, I won some shillings at "The Race-Game," they were
impounded for the service of the C.M.S., and an aunt of mine, making her
sole excursion into melody, wrote for the benefit of her young friends:
"Would you like to be told the best use for a penny?
I can tell you a use which is better than any--
Not on toys or on fruit or on sweetmeats to spend it,
But over the seas to the heathen to send it."
I learned my religion from my mother, the sweetest, brightest, and most
persuasive of teachers, and what she taught I received as gospel.
"Oh that those lips had language! Life has past
With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
_Sit anima mea cum Sanctis._ May my lot be with those Evangelical saints
from whom I first learned that, in the supreme work of salvation, no
human being and no created thing can interpose between the soul and the
Creator. Happy is the man whose religious life has been built on the
impregnable rock of that belief.
So much for the foundation. The superstructure was rather accidental
than designed.
From my very earliest days I had a natural love of pomp and pageantry;
and, though I never saw them, I used to read of them with delight in
books of continental travel, and try to depict them in my sketch-books,
and even enact them with my toys. Then came Sir Walter Scott, who
inspired me, as he inspired so many greater men, with the love of
ecclesiastical splendour, and so turned my vague love of ceremony into a
definite channel. Another contribution to the same end was made, all
unwittingly, by my dear and deeply Protestant father. He was an
enthusiast for Gothic architecture, and it was natural to enquire the
uses of such things as piscinas and sedilia in fabrics which he taught
me to admire. And then came the opportune discovery (in an idle moment
under a dull sermon) of the Occasional Offices of the Prayer Book. If
language meant anything, those Offices meant the sacramental system of
the Catholic Church; and the impression derived from the Prayer Book was
confirmed by Jeremy Taylor and _The Christian Year_. I was always
impatient of the attempt, even when made by the most respectable people,
to pervert plain English, and I felt perfect confidence in building the
Catholic superstructure on my Evangelical foundation.
As soon as I had turned fourteen, I was confirmed by the Bishop of Ely
(Harold Browne), and made my first Communion in Woburn Church on Easter
Day, April 21, 1867.
After the Easter Recess, I went with my parents to London, then seething
with excitement over the Tory Reform Bill, which created Household
Suffrage in towns. My father, being Sergeant-at-Arms, could give me a
seat under the Gallery whenever he chose, and I heard some of the most
memorable debates in that great controversy. In the previous year my
uncle, Lord Russell, with Mr. Gladstone as Leader of the House of
Commons, had been beaten in an attempt to lower the franchise; but the
contest had left me cold. The debates of 1867 awoke quite a fresh
interest in me. I began to understand the Democratic, as against the
Whig, ideal; and I was tremendously impressed by Disraeli, who seemed to
tower by a head and shoulders above everyone in the House. Gladstone
played a secondary and ambiguous part; and, if I heard him speak, which
I doubt, the speech left no dint in my memory.
At this point of the narrative it is necessary to make a passing
allusion to Doctors, who, far more than Premiers or Priests or any other