Chapter VIII: Introduction (8)

A lady nearly related to Mrs. Longley, who had married an English nobleman, adopted the views of the Plymouth Brothers (or as all the Mrs. Malaprops of the period invariably styled them, the “Yarmouth Bloaters”), which had burst into sudden notoriety. When her husband died leaving her a very wealthy woman, she thought it her duty to carry out the ideas of her sect by putting down such superfluities of her establishment as horses and carriages, and a well appointed table. She accordingly wrote to her father and begged him to dispose of all her plate and equipages. Lord C—— made no remonstrance and offered no arguments; and after a year or two he received a letter from his daughter couched in a different strain. She told him that she had now reached the conviction that it was “the will of God that a peeress should live as a peeress,” and she begged him to buy for her new carriages and fresh plate. Lord C——’s answer must have been a little mortifying. “I knew, my dear, that you would come sooner or later to your senses. You will find your carriages at your coachmakers and your plate at your bankers.”

Mrs. Evans, _née_ Sophia Parnell, the aunt of both these ladies, and a great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, was, as I have said, our nearest neighbour and in the later years of my life at Newbridge my very kind old friend. For a long time political differences between my father and her husband,—George Hampden Evans, M.P., who had managed to wrest the county from the Tories,—kept the families apart, but after his death we were pleasantly intimate for many years. She often spoke to me of the Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: “There is mischief brewing! I am troubled at what is going on at Avondale. My nephew’s wife” (the American lady, Delia Stewart) “has a hatred of England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it too!” How true was her foresight there is no need now to rehearse, nor how near that “little Hannibal” came to our Rome! Charles Parnell was very far from being a representative Irishman. He was of purely English extraction, and even in the female line had no drop of Irish blood. His mother, as all the world knows, was an American; his grandmother was one of the Howards of the family of the Earls of Wicklow, his great-grandmother a Brooke, of a branch of the old Cheshire house; and, beyond this lady again, his grand-dames were Wards and Whitsheds. In short, like other supposed “illustrious Irishmen”—Burke, Grattan, Goldsmith, and Wellington—Mr. Parnell was only one example more of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon intellect in every land of its adoption.

Mrs. Evans had known Madame de Stael, Condorcet and many other interesting French people in her youth, and loved the Condorcets warmly. She described to me a stiff, old-fashioned dinner at which she had been present when Madame de Stael was a guest. After dinner, the ladies, having retired to the drawing-room, sat apart from Madame de Stael in terror, and she looked them over with undisguised contempt. After a while she rose and, without asking the consent of the mistress of the house, rang the bell. When the footman appeared, she delivered the startling order: “Tell the gentlemen to come up!” The sensation among the formal and scandalized ladies upstairs, and the gentlemen just settling down to their usual long potations below, may be well imagined.

When her husband died, Mrs. Evans built in his memory a fine Round Tower on the plan and of the size of the best of the old Irish towers. It stands on high ground on what was her deer-park, and is a useful landmark to sailors all along that dangerous coast, where the dreadful wreck of the _Tayleur_ took place. On the shore below, under the lofty black cliffs, are several very imposing caverns. In the largest of these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans, on one occasion, gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon-pies and champagne, when some one observed that the tide might soon be rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of time, and the festival proceeded for another half-hour, when somebody rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of alarm. The tide _had_ risen, and was already beating at a formidable depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave. Consternation of course reigned among the party. A night spent in the further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a cheerful prospect. Could anybody get up through the shaft to the upper cliff? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to some of the almost fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax, Mrs. Evans’ own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting rocks and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments and be safely landed in the bay outside, beyond the reach of the sea. The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been pre-arranged by the hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country guests.

Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded with the service and the rappings were repeated again and again, his patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his astonished congregation:—“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Turn out that dog, if you please! It’s extremely wrong to bring a dog into church.” During the winter Mrs. Evans was wont to live much alone in her country house, surrounded only by her old servants and multitudes of old books. When at last, in old age, she found herself attacked by mortal disease she went to Paris to profit by the skill of some French physician in whom she had confidence, and there, with unshaken courage she passed away. Her remains, enclosed in a leaden coffin, were brought back to Portrane, and her Irish terrier who adored her, somehow recognised the dreadful chest and exhibited a frenzy of grief; leaping upon it and tearing at the pall with piteous cries. Next morning, strange to say, the poor brute was, with six others about the place, in such a state of excitement as to be supposed to be rabid and it was thought necessary to shoot them all. One of them leaped the gate of the yard and escaping bit two of my father’s cows, which became rabid, and were shot in my presence. Mrs. Evans was buried beside her beloved husband in the little roofless and ruined church of Portrane, close by the shore. On another grave in the same church belonging to the same family, a dog had some years previously died of grief.

A brother of this lady, who walked over often to Newbridge from Portrane to bring my mother some scented broom which she loved, was a very singular and pathetic character. He was a younger brother of that sufficiently astute man of the world, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards Lord Congleton, but was his antipodes in disposition. Thomas Parnell, “Old Tom Parnell,” as all Dublin knew him for forty years, had a huge ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long forgotten period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order which, when completed, should afford infallible answers to every question of the human mind! To construct the interminable tables required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and fortune. For years which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a “Protestant Office” in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks and printers; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used to say laughingly, on “a second-hand bone,”) gave money also freely in alms. One way or another Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in need of a barber. Once or twice every summer he was prevailed on by his sister to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks’ visit in the country at Portrane; and to her and all her visitors he preached incessantly his monotonous appeal: “Repent; and cease to eat good dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts!” When his sister—who had treated him as a mother would treat a silly boy—died, she left him a small annuity, to be paid to him weekly in dribblets by trustees, lest he should spend it at once and starve if he received it half-yearly. After this epoch he worked on with fewer interruptions than ever at his dreary text-books in that empty, grimy office. Summer’s sun and winter’s snow were alike to the lonely old man. He ploughed on at his hopeless task. There was no probability that he should live to fill up the interminable columns, and no apparent reason to suppose that any human being would use the books if he ever did so and supposing them to be printed. But still he laboured on. Old friends—myself among them—who had known him in their childhood, looked in now and then to shake hands with him, and, noticing how pale and worn and aged he seemed, tried to induce him to come to their homes. But he only exhorted them (like Tolstoi, whom he rather resembled), as usual, to repent and give up good dinners and help him with his texts, and denounced wildly all rich people who lived in handsome parks with mud villages at their gates, as he said, “like a velvet dress with a draggled skirt.” Then, when his visitor had departed, Mr. Parnell returned patiently to his interminable texts. At last one day, late in the autumn twilight, the porter, whose duty it was to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting quietly in the chair where he had laboured so long—fallen into the last long sleep.

I never saw much of Irish society out of our own county. Once, when I was eighteen, my father and I went a tour of visits to his relations in Connaught, travelling, as was necessary in those days, very slowly with post-horses to our carriage, my maid on the box, and obliged to stop at inns on the way. Some of these inns were wretched places. I remember in one finding a packet of letters addressed to some attorney, under my bolster! At another, this dialogue took place between me and the waiter:—

“What can we have for dinner?”

“Anything you please, Ma’am. _Anything_ you please.”

“Well, but exactly what can we have?”

(Waiter, triumphantly): “You can have a pair of ducks.”

“I am sorry to say Mr. Cobbe cannot eat ducks. What else?”

“They are very fine ducks, Ma’am.”

“I dare say. But what else?”

“You might have the ducks boiled, Ma’am!”

“No, no. Can we have mutton?”

“Well; not mutton, to-day, Ma’am.”

“Some beef?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Some veal?”

“Not any veal, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then, a fowl?”

“We haven’t got a fowl.”

“What on earth have you got, then?”

“Well, then, Ma’am, I’m afeared if you won’t have the fine pair of ducks, there’s nothing for it but bacon and eggs!”

We went first to Drumcar and next (a two days’ drive) to Moydrum Castle which then belonged to my father’s cousin, old Lady Castlemaine. Another old cousin in the house showed me where, between two towers covered with ivy, she had looked one dark night out of her bedroom window on hearing a wailing noise below, and had seen some white object larger than any bird, floating slowly up and then sinking down into the shadow below again, and yet again. Of course it was the Banshee; and somebody had died afterwards! We also had our Banshee at Newbridge about that time. One stormy and rainy Sunday night in October my father was reading a sermon as usual to the assembled household, and the family, gathered near the fire in what we were wont to call on these evenings “Sinner’s chair” and the “Seat of the Scornful,” were rather somnolent, when the most piercing and unearthly shrieks arose apparently just outside the windows in the pleasure ground, and startled us all wide awake. At the head of the row of servants sat our dear old housekeeper “Joney” then the head-gardener’s wife, who had adopted a child of three years old, and this evening had left him fast asleep in the housekeeper’s room, which was under part of the drawing-room. Naturally she and all of us supposed that “Johnny” had wakened and was screaming on finding himself alone; and though the outcries were not like those of a child, “Joney” rose and hastily passed down the room and went to look after her charge. To reach the housekeeper’s room she necessarily passed the servants’ hall and out of it rushed the coachman—a big, usually red-faced Englishman, whom she declared was on that occasion as pale as death. The next instant one of the housemaids, who had likewise played truant from prayers, came tottering down from a bedroom (so remote that I have always wondered how _any_ noise below the drawing-room could have reached it), and sunk fainting on a chair. The little boy meanwhile was sleeping like a cherub in undisturbed repose in a clothes basket! What that wild noise was,—heard by at least two dozen people,—we never learned and somehow did not care much to investigate.

After our visit at Moydrum my father and I went to yet other cousins at Garbally; his mother’s old home. At that time—I speak of more than half a century ago,—the Clancarty family was much respected in Ireland; and the household at Garbally was conducted on high religious principles and in a very dignified manner. It was in the Forties that the annual Sheep Fair of Ballinasloe was at its best, and something like 200,000 sheep were then commonly herded at night in Garbally Park. The scene of the Fair was described as curious, but (like a stupid young prig, as I must have been) I declined the place offered me in one of the carriages and stopped in the house on the plea of a cold, but really to enjoy a private hunt in the magnificent library of which I had caught a glimpse. When the various parties came back late in the day there was much talk of a droll mishap. The Marquis of Downshire of that time, who was stopping in the house, was a man of colossal strength, and rumour said he had killed two men by accidental blows intended as friendly. However this may be, he was on this occasion overthrown _by sheep_! He was standing in the gangway between the hurdles in the great fair, when an immense flock of terrified animals rushed through, overset him and trampled him under their feet. When he came home, laughing good humouredly at his disaster, he presented a marvellous spectacle with his rather _voyant_ light costume of the morning in a frightful pickle. Another agreeable man in the house was the Lord Devon of that day, a very able and cultivated man (whom I straightway interrogated concerning Gibbon’s chapter on the Courtenays!); and poor Lord Leitrim, a kindly and good Irish landlord, afterwards most cruelly murdered. There were also the Ernes and Lord Enniskillen and many others whom I have forgotten, and a dear aged lady; the Marchioness of Ormonde. Hearing I had a cold, she kindly proposed to treat me medically and said: “I should advise you to try Brandy and Salt. For my own part I take Morrison’s pills whenever I am ill, if I cannot get hydropathic baths; but I have a very great opinion of Tar-water. Holloway’s ointment and pills, too, are excellent. My son, you know, joined Mr. ——” (I have forgotten the name) “to pay £15,000 to St. John Long for his famous recipe; but it turned out no good when he had it. No! I advise you decidedly to try brandy and salt.”

From Garbally we drove to Parsonstown, where Lady Rosse was good enough to welcome us to indulge my intense longing to see the great telescope, then quite recently erected. Lord Rosse at that time believed that, as he had resolved into separate stars many of the nebulæ which were irresolvable by Herschel’s telescope, there was a presumption that _all_ were resolvable; and consequently that the nebular hypothesis must be abandoned. The later discovery of gaseous nebulæ by the spectroscope re-established the theory. I was very anxious on the subject, having pinned my faith already on the _Vestiges of Creation_ (then a new book), in sequence to Nichol’s _Architecture of the Heavens_: that prose-poem of science. Lord Rosse was infinitely indulgent to my girlish curiosity, and took me to see the process of polishing the speculum of his second telescope; a most ingenious piece of mechanism invented mainly by himself. He also showed me models which he has made in plaster of lunar craters. I saw the great telescope by day, but, alas, when darkness came and it was to have been ready for me to look through it and I was trembling with anticipation, the butler came to the drawing-room door and announced: “A rainy night, my lord”! It was a life-long disappointment, for we could not stay another day though hospitably pressed to do so; and I never had another chance.

Lord Rosse had guessed already that Robert Chambers was the author of the _Vestiges_. He explained to me the reason for the enormous mass of masonry on which the seven-foot telescope rested, by the curious fact that even where it stood within his park, the roll of a cart more than two miles away, outside, was enough to make the ground tremble and to disturb the observation.

There was a romantic story then current in Ireland about Lord and Lady Rosse. It was said that, as a young man, he had gone _incog._ and worked as a handicraftsman in some large foundry in the north of England to learn the secrets of machine making. After a time his employer, considering him a peculiarly promising young artisan, invited him occasionally to a Sunday family dinner when young Lord Parsons, as he then was, speedily fell in love with his host’s daughter. Observing what was going on, the father put a veto on what he thought would be a _mésalliance_ for Miss Green, and the supposed artisan left his employment and the country; but not without receiving from the young lady an assurance that she returned his attachment. Shortly afterwards, having gone home and obtained his father, Lord Rosse’s consent, he re-appeared and now made his proposals to Mr. Green, _père_, in all due form as the heir of a good estate and an earldom. He was not rejected this time.

I tell this story only as a pretty one current when I saw Lord and Lady Rosse; a very happy and united couple with little children who have since grown to be distinguished men. Very possibly it may be only a myth!

I never saw Archbishop Whately except when he confirmed me in the church of Malahide. He was no doubt a sincerely pious man, but, his rough and irreverent manner (intended, I believe, as a protest against the Pecksniffian tone then common among evangelical dignitaries) was almost repulsive and certainly startling. Outside his palace in Stephen’s Green there was at that time a row of short columns connected from top to top by heavy chains which fell in festoons and guarded the gardens of the square. Nothing would serve his Grace (we were told with horror by the spectators) than to go of a morning after breakfast and sit on these chains smoking his cigar as he swung gently back and forth, kicking the ground to gain impetus.

On the occasion of my confirmation he exhibited one of his whims most unpleasantly for me. This was, that he must actually touch, in his episcopal benediction, the _head_, not merely the _hair_, of the kneeling catechumen. Unhappily, my maid had not foreseen this contingency, but had thought she could not have a finer opportunity for displaying her skill in plaiting my redundant locks; and had built up such an edifice with plaits and pins, (on the part of my head which necessarily came under the Archbishop’s hand) that he had much ado to overthrow the same! He did so, however, effectually; and I finally walked back, through the church to my pew with all my _chevelure_ hanging down in disorder, far from “admired” by me or anybody.

Of all the phases of orthodoxy I think that of Whately,—well called the _Hard Church_,—was the last which I could have adopted at any period of my life. It was obviously his view that a chain of propositions might be constructed by iron logic, beginning with the record of a miracle two thousand years ago and ending with unavoidable conversion to the love of God and Man!

The last person of whom I shall speak as known to me first in Ireland, was that dear and noble woman, Fanny Kemble. She has not mentioned in her delightful _Records_ how our acquaintance, destined to ripen into a life-long friendship, began at Newbridge, but it was in a droll and characteristic way.

Mrs. Kemble’s friend “H.S.”—Harriet St. Leger—lived at Ardgillan Castle, eight Irish miles from Newbridge. Her sister, the wife of Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor and mother of the late Tory Whip, was my mother’s best-liked neighbour, and at an early age I was taught to look with respect on the somewhat singular figure of Miss St. Leger. In those days any departure from the conventional dress of the time was talked of as if it were altogether the most important fact connected with a woman, no matter what might be the greatness of her character or abilities. Like her contemporaries and fellow countrywomen, the Ladies of Llangollen, (also Irish), Harriet St. Leger early adopted a costume consisting of a riding habit (in her case with a skirt of sensible length) and a black beaver hat. All the empty-headed men and women in the county prated incessantly about these inoffensive garments, insomuch that I arrived early at the conviction that, rational and convenient as such dress would be, the game was not worth the candle. Things are altered so far now that, could dear Harriet reappear, I believe the universal comment on her dress would rather be: “How sensible and befitting”! rather than the silly, “How odd”! Anyway I imagine she must have afforded a somewhat singular contrast to her ever magnificent, not to say gorgeous friend Fanny Kemble, when at the great Exhibition of 1851, they were the observed of observers, sitting for a long time side by side close to the crystal fountain.

Every reader of the charming _Records of a Girlhood_ and _Recollections of Later Life_, must have felt some curiosity about the personality of the friend to whom those letters of our English Sevigné were addressed. I have before me as I write an excellent reproduction in platinotype from a daguerreotype of herself which dear Harriet gave me some twenty years ago. The pale, kind, sad face is, I think inexpressibly touching; and the woman who wore it deserved all the affection which Fanny Kemble gave her. She was a deep and singularly critical thinker and reader, and had one of the warmest hearts which ever beat under a cold and shy exterior. The iridescent genius of Fanny Kemble in the prime of her splendid womanhood, and my poor young soul, overburdened with thoughts too great and difficult for me, were equally drawn to seek her sympathy.

It happened once, somewhere in the early Fifties, that Mrs. Kemble was paying a visit to Miss St. Leger at Ardgillan, and we arranged that she should bring her over some day to Newbridge to luncheon. I was, of course, prepared to receive my guest very cordially but, to my astonishment, when Mrs. Kemble entered she made me the most formal salutation conceivable and, after being seated, answered all my small politenesses in monosyllables and with obvious annoyance and disinclination to converse with me or with any of my friends whom I presented to her. Something was evidently frightfully amiss, and Harriet perceived it; but what could it be? What could be done? Happily the gong sounded for luncheon, and, my father being absent, my eldest brother offered his arm to Mrs. Kemble and led her, walking with more than her usual stateliness across the two halls to the dining-room, where he placed her, of course, beside himself. I was at the other end of the table but I heard afterwards all that occurred. We were a party of eighteen, and naturally the long table had a good many dishes on it in the old fashion. My brother looked over it and asked: “What will you take, Mrs. Kemble? Roast fowl? or galantine? or a little Mayonnaise, or what else?”

“Thank you,” replied Mrs. Kemble, “_If there be a potato!_”

Of course there was a potato—nay, several; but a terrible _gêne_ hung over us all till Miss Taylor hurriedly called for her carriage, and the party drove off.

The moment they left the door after our formal farewells, Harriet St. Leger (as she afterwards told me) fell on her friend: “Well, Fanny, never, _never_ will I bring you anywhere again. How _could_ you behave so to Fanny Cobbe?”

“I cannot permit any one,” said Mrs. Kemble, “to invite a number of people to meet me without having asked my consent; I do not choose to be made a gazing-stock to the county. Miss Cobbe had got up a regular party of all those people, and you could see the room was decorated for it.”

“Good Heavens, what are you talking of?” said Harriet, “those ladies and gentlemen are all her relations, stopping in the house. She could not turn them out because you were coming, and her room is always full of flowers.”

“Is that really so?” said Mrs. Kemble, “Then you shall tell Fanny Cobbe that I ask her pardon for my bad behaviour, and if she will forgive me and come to see me in London, _I will never behave badly to her again_?”

In a letter of hers to Harriet St. Leger given to me after her death, I was touched to read the following reference to this droll incident:—

“Bilton Hotel,
“Wed. 9th.

“I am interrupted by a perfect bundle of fragrance and fresh colour
sent by Miss Cobbe with a note in which I am sorry to say she gives me
very little hope of seeing her at all while I am in Dublin. This, as
you know, is a real disappointment to me. I had rather fallen in love
with her, and wished very much to have had some opportunity of more
intercourse with her. Her face when I came to talk to her seemed to me
keen and sweet—a charming combination—and I was so grateful to her for
not being repelled by my ungracious demeanour at her house, that I had
quite looked forward to the pleasure of seeing her again.

“F. A. K.”

I did go to see her in London; and she kept her word, and was my dear and affectionate friend and bore many things from me with perfect good humour, for forty years; including (horrible to recall!) my falling fast asleep while she was reading Shakespeare to Mary Lloyd and me in our drawing-room here at Hengwrt! Among her many kindnesses was the gift of a mass of her Correspondence from the beginning of her theatrical career in 1821 to her last years. She also successively gave me the MSS. of all her _Records_, but in each case I induced her to take them back and publish them herself. I have now, as a priceless legacy, a large parcel of her own letters, and five thick volumes of autograph letters addressed to her by half the celebrated men and women of her time. They testify uniformly to the admiration, affection and respect wherewith,—her little foibles notwithstanding,—she was regarded by three generations.

CHAPTER
VIII.
_UPROOTED._

I draw now to the closing years of my life at Newbridge, after I had published my first book and before my father died. They were happy and peaceful years, though gradually overshadowed by the sense that the long tenure of that beloved home must soon end. It is one of the many perversities of woman’s destiny that she is, not only by hereditary instinct a home-making animal, but is encouraged to the uttermost to centre all her interests in her home; every pursuit which would give her anchorage elsewhere, (always excepting marriage) being more or less under general disapproval. Yet when the young woman takes thoroughly to this natural home-making, when she has, like a plant, sent her roots down into the cellars and her tendrils up into the garrets and every room bears the impress of her personality, when she glories in every good picture on the walls or bit of choice china on the tables and blushes for every stain on the carpets, when, in short, her home is, as it should be, her outer garment, her nest, her shell, fitted to her like that of a murex, then, almost invariably comes to her the order to leave it all, tear herself out of it,—and go to make (if she can) some other home elsewhere. Supposing her to have married early, and that she is spared the late uprooting from her father’s house at his death, she has usually to bear a similar transition when she survives her husband; and in this case often with the failing health and spirits of old age. I do not know how these heartbreaks are to be spared to women of the class of the daughters and wives of country gentlemen or clergymen; but they are hard to bear. Perhaps the most fortunate daughters (harsh as it seems to say so) are those whose fathers die while they are themselves still in full vigour and able to begin a new existence with spirit and make new friends; as was my case. Some of my contemporaries, whose fathers lived till they were fifty, or even older, had a bitterer trial in quitting their homes and were never able to start afresh.

In my last few years at Newbridge my father and I were both cheered by the frequent presence of my dear little niece, Helen, on whom he doted, and towards whom flowed out the tenderness which had scarcely been allowed its free course with his own children. _L’Art d’être Grandpère_ is surely the most beautiful of arts! When all personal pleasures have pretty well died away then begins the reflected pleasure in the fresh, innocent delights of the child; a moonlight of happiness perhaps more sweet and tender than the garish joys of the noontide of life. To me, who had never lived in a house with little children, it brought a whole world of revelations to have this babe and afterwards her little sister, in a nursery under my supervision during their mother’s long illnesses. I understood for the first time all that a child may be in a woman’s life, and how their little hands may pull our heart-strings. My nieces were dear, good, little babes then; they are dear and good women now; the comfort of my age, as they were the darlings of my middle life.

Having received sufficient encouragement from the _succès d’estime_ of my _Theory of Intuitive Morals_, I proceeded now to write the first of the three books on _Practical Morals_, with which I designed to complete the work. My volume of _Religious Duty_, then written, has proved, however, the only one of the series ever published. At a later time I wrote some chapters on _Personal_ and on _Social Duty_, but was dissatisfied with them, and destroyed the MSS.

As _Religious Duty_ (3rd edition) is still to be had (included by Mr. Fisher Unwin in his late re-issue of my principal works), I need not trouble the reader by any such analysis of it as I have given of the former volume. In writing concerning _Religious Duty_ at the time, I find in a letter of mine to Harriet St. Leger (returned to me when she grew blind), that I spoke of it thus:—

“Newbridge, April 25th, 1857.

“You see I have, after all, inserted a little preface. I thought it
necessary to explain the object of the book, lest it might seem
superfluous where it coincides with orthodox teaching, and offensively
daring where it diverges from it. Your cousin’s doubt about my
Christianity lasting till she reached the end of _Intuitive Morals_,
made me resolve to forestall in this case any such danger of seeming
to fight without showing my colours. You see I have now nailed them
mast-high. But though I have done this, I cannot say that it has been
in any way to _make converts_ to my own creed that I have written this
book. I wanted to show those who are already Theists, actually or
approximately, that Theism is something far more than they seem
commonly to understand. I wanted, too, to show to those who have had
their historical faith shaken, but who still cling to it from the
belief that without it no real _religion_ is possible, that they may
find all which their hearts can need in a faith purely intuitive.
Perhaps I ought rather to say that these objects have been before me
in working at my book. I suppose in reality the impulse to such an
undertaking comes more simply. We think we have found some truths, and
we long to develop and communicate them. We do not sit down and say
‘Such and such sort of people want such and such a book. I will try
and write it.’”

The plan of this book is simple. After discussing in the first chapter the _Canon of Religious Duty_, which I define to be “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and soul and strength,”—I discuss, in the next chapter, _Religious Offences_ against that Law,—Blasphemy, Hypocrisy, Perjury, &c. The third chapter deals with _Religious Faults_ (failures of duty) such as Thanklessness, Irreverence, Worldliness, &c. The fourth, which constitutes the main bulk of the book, consists of what are practically six Sermons on Thanksgiving, Adoration, Prayer, Repentance, Faith, and Self-Consecration.

The book has been very much liked by some readers, especially the chapter on _Thanksgiving_, which I reprinted later in a tiny volume. It is strange in these days of pessimism to read it again. I am glad I wrote it when my heart was unchilled, my sight undimmed, by the frozen fog which has been hanging over us for the last two decades. An incident connected with this chapter touched me deeply. My father in his last illness permitted it to be read to him. Having never before listened to anything I had written, and having, even then, no idea who wrote the book, he expressed pleasure and sympathy with it, especially with a passage in which I speak of the hope of being, in the future life, “young again in all that makes childhood beautiful and holy.” It was a pledge to me of how near our hearts truly were, under apparently the world-wide differences.

My father was now sinking slowly beneath the weight of years and of frequent returns of the malarial fever of India,—in those days called “Ague,”—which he had caught half a century before in the Mahratta wars. I have said something already of his powerful character, his upright, honourable, fearless nature; his strong sense of Duty. Of the lower sort of faults and vices he was absolutely incapable. No one who knew him could imagine him as saying a false or prevaricating word; of driving a hard bargain; of eating or drinking beyond the strictest rules of temperance; least of all, of faithlessness in thought or deed to his wife or her memory. His mistakes and errors, such as they were, arose solely from a fiery temper and a despotic will, nourished rather than checked by his ideas concerning the rights of parents, and husbands, masters and employers; and from his narrow religious creed. Such as he was, every one honoured, some feared, and many loved him.

Before I pass on to detail more of the incidents of my own life, I shall here narrate all that I can recall of his descriptions of the most important occurrence in his career—the battle of Assaye.

In Mr. George Hooper’s delightful Life of Wellington (_English Men of Action Series_) there is a spirited account of that battle, whereby British supremacy in India was practically secured. Mr. Hooper speaks enthusiastically of the behaviour, in that memorable fight, of the 19th Light Dragoons, and of its “splendid charge,” which, with the “irresistible sweep” of the 78th, proved the “decisive stroke” of the great day. He describes this charge thus:—

... “The piquets, or leading troops on the right were by mistake led
off towards Assaye, uncovering the second line, and falling themselves
into a deadly converging fire. The Seventy-Fourth followed the piquets
into the cannonade, and a great gap was thus made in the array. The
enemy’s horse rode up to charge, and so serious was the peril on the
right that the Nineteenth Light Dragoons and a native cavalry regiment
were obliged to charge at once. Eager for the fray, they galloped up,
cheering as they went, and cheered by the wounded; and, riding home,
even to the batteries, saved the remnants of the piquets and of the
Seventy-Fourth.” (P. 76.)

My father, then a cornet in the regiment, carried the regimental flag of the Nineteenth through that charge, and for the rest of the day; the non-commissioned officer whose duty it was to bear it having been struck dead at the first onset, and my father saving the flag from falling into the hands of the Mahrattas.

The Nineteenth Light Dragoons of that epoch wore a grey uniform, and heavy steel helmets with large red plumes, which caused the Mahrattas to nickname them “The Red Headed Rascals.” On their shoulders were simple epaulettes made of chains of some common white metal, one of which I retrieved from a heap of rubbish fifty years after Assaye, and still wear as a bracelet. The men could scarcely have deserved the name of _Light_ if many of them weighed, as did my father at 18, no less than 18 stone, inclusive of his saddle and accoutrements! The fashion of long hair, tied in “pig tails,” still prevailed; and my father often laughingly boasted that the mass of his fair hair, duly tied with black ribbon, had descended far enough to reach his saddle and to form an efficient protection from sabre cuts on his back and shoulders. Mr. Hooper estimates the total number of the British army at Assaye at 5,000; my father used to speak of it as about 4,500; while the _cavalry_ alone, of the enemy were some 30,000. The infantry were seemingly innumerable, and altogether covered the plain. There was also a considerable force of artillery on Scindias’ side, and, commanding them, was a French officer whose name my father repeatedly mentioned, but which I have unfortunately forgotten.[12] The handful of English troops had done a full day’s march under an Indian sun before the battle began. When the Nineteenth received orders to charge they had been sitting long on their horses in a position which left them exposed to the _ricochet_ of the shot of the enemy, and the strain on the discipline of the men, as one after another was picked off, had been enormous; not to prevent them from _retreating_—they had no such idea,—but to stop them from charging without orders. At last the word of command to charge came from Wellesley, and the whole regiment responded with a _roar_! Then came the fire of death and men and officers fell all around, as it seemed almost every second man. Among the rest, as I have said, the colour-sergeant was struck down, and my father, as was his duty, seized the flag from the poor fellow’s hands as he fell and carried it, waving in front of the regiment up to the guns of the enemy.

In one or other of the repeated charges which the Nineteenth continued to make even after their commanding officer, Colonel Maxwell, had been killed, my father found himself in hand to hand conflict with the French General who was in command of the Mahratta artillery. He wore an ordinary uniform and my father, having struck him with his sabre at the back of his neck, expected to see terrible results from the blow of a hand notorious all his life for its extraordinary strength. But fortunately the General had prudently included a coat of armour under his uniform; and the blow only resulted in a considerable dent in the blade of my father’s sabre; a dent which (in Biblical language) “may be seen unto this day,” where the weapon hangs in the study at Newbridge.

At another period of this awful battle the young Cornet dismounted beside a stream to drink, and to allow his horse to do the same. While so occupied, Colonel Wellesley came up to follow his example, and they conversed for a few minutes while dipping their hands and faces in the brook (or river). As they did so, there slowly oozed down upon them, trickling through the water, a streamlet of blood. Of course they both turned away in horror and remounted to return to the battle.

At last the tremendous struggle was over. An army of 4,500 or 5,000 tired English troops, had routed five times as many horsemen and perhaps twenty times as many infantry of the warlike Mahrattas. The field was clear and the English flag waved over the English Marathon.

After this the poor, wearied soldiers were compelled to ride back _ten miles_ to camp for the night; and when they reached their ground and dismounted, many of them—my father among the rest—fell on the earth and slept where they lay. Next morning they marched back to the field of Assaye and the scene which met their eyes was one which no lapse of years could efface from memory. The pomp and glory and joy of victory were past; the horror of it was before them in mangled corpses of men and horses, over which hung clouds of flies and vultures. Fourteen officers of his own regiment, whose last meal on earth he had shared in convivial merriment, my father saw buried together in one grave. Then the band of the regiment played “_The Rose Tree_” and the men marched away with set faces. Long years afterwards I happened to play that old air on the piano, but my father stopped me, “Do not play _that_ tune, pray! I cannot bear the memories it brings to me.”

After Assaye my father fought at Argaon (or Argaum), a battle which Mr. Turner describes as “even more decisive than the last”; and on December 14th he joined in the terrific storming of the great fortress of Gawiljarh, with which the war in the Deccan terminated. He received medals for Assaye and Argaum, just fifty years after those battles were fought!

_Charles Cobbe_,
1857.
]

After his return from India, my father remained at his mother’s house in Bath till 1809, when he married my dear mother, then living with her guardians close by, at 29, Royal Crescent; and brought her to Newbridge, where they both lived, as I have described, with few and short interruptions till she died in October, 1847, and he in November, 1857. For all that half century he acted nobly the part to which he was called, of landlord, magistrate and head of a family. There was nothing in him of the ideal Irish, fox-hunting, happy-go-lucky, much indebted Squire. There never was a year in his life in which every one of his bills was not settled. His books, piled on his study table, showed the regular payment, week by week, of all his labourers for fifty years. No quarter day passed without every servant in the house receiving his, or her wages. So far was Newbridge from a Castle Rackrent that though much in it of the furniture and decorations belonged to the previous century, everything was kept in perfect order and repair in the house and in the stables, coach-houses and beautiful old garden. Punctuality reigned under the old soldier’s _régime_; clocks and bells and gongs sounded regularly for prayers and meals; and dinner was served sharply to the moment. I should indeed be at a loss to say in what respect my father betrayed his Anglo-Irish race, if it were not his high spirit.

At last, and very soon after the photograph which I am inserting in this book was taken, the long, good life drew to its end in peace. I have found a letter which I wrote to Harriet St. Leger a day or two after his death, and I will here transcribe part of it, rather than narrate the event afresh.

“Nov. 14th, 1857.

“Dearest Harriet,

“My poor father’s sufferings are over. He died on Wednesday evening,
without the least pain or struggle, having sunk gradually into an
unconscious state since Sunday morning. At all events it proved a most
merciful close to his long sufferings, for he never seemed even aware
of the terrible state into which the poor limbs fell, but became
weaker and weaker, and as the mortification advanced, died away as if
in the gentlest sleep he had known for many a day. It is all very
merciful, I can feel nothing else, though it is very sad to have had
no parting words of blessing, such as I am sure he would have given
me. All those he loved best were near him. He had Dotie till the last
day of his consciousness, and the little thing continually asked
afterwards to go to his study, and enquired, ‘Grandpa ‘seep?’ When he
had ceased to speak at all comprehensibly, the morning before he died
he pointed to her picture, and half smiled when I brought it to him.
Poor old father! He is free now from all his miseries—gone home to God
after his long, long life of good and honour! Fifty years he has lived
as master here. Who but God knows all the kind and generous actions he
has done in that half century! To the very last he completed
everything, paying his labourers and settling his books on Saturday;
and we find all his arrangements made in the most perfect and
thoughtful way for everybody. There was a letter left for me. It only
contained a £100 note and the words, ‘The last token of the love and
affection of a father to his daughter.’... ‘He is now looking so noble
and happy, I might say, so handsome; his features seem so glorified by
death, that it does one good to go and sit beside him. I never saw
Death look so little terrible. Would that the poor form could lie
there, ever! The grief will be far worse after to-day, when we shall
see it for the last time. Jessie has made an outline of the face as it
is now, very like. How wonderful and blessed is this glorifying power
of death; taking away the lines of age and weak distension of muscles,
and leaving only, as it would seem, the true face of the man as he was
beneath all surface weaknesses; the ‘garment by the soul laid by’
smoothed out and folded! My cousins and Jessie and I all feel very
much how blessedly this face speaks to us; how it is _not him_, but a
token of what he is now. I grieve that I was not more to him, that I
did not better win his love and do more to deserve it; but even this
sorrow has its comfort. Perhaps he knows now that with all my heart I
did feel the deepest tenderness for his sufferings and respect for his
great virtues. At all events the wall of _creed_ has fallen down from
between our souls for ever, and I believe that was the one great
obstacle which I could never overthrow entirely. Forbearing as he
proved himself, it was never forgotten. Now _all_ that divided us is
over.... It seems all very dream-like just now, long as we have
thought of it, and I know the waking will be a terrible pang when
_all_ is over and I have left _everything_ round which my heart roots
have twined in five and thirty years. But I don’t fear—how can I, when
my utmost hopes could not have pointed to an end so happy as God has
given to my poor old father? Everything is merciful about it—even to
the time when we were all together here, and when I am neither young
enough to need protection, or old enough to feel diminished
energies....”

I carried out my long formed resolution, of course, and started on my pilgrimage just three weeks after my father’s death. Leaving Newbridge was the worst wrench of my life. The home of my childhood and youth, of which I had been mistress for nineteen years, for every corner of which I had cared, and wherein there was not a room without its tender associations,—it seemed almost impossible to drag myself away. To strip my pretty bedroom of its pictures and books and ornaments, many of them my mother’s gifts, and my mother’s work; to send off my harp to be sold; and make over to my brother my private possessions of ponies and carriage,—(luckily my dear dog was dead,)—and take leave of all the dear old servants and village people, formed a whole series of pangs. I remember feeling a distinct regret and smiling at myself for doing so, when I locked for the last time the big, old-fashioned tea-chest out of which I had made the family breakfast for twenty years. Then came the last morning and as I drove out of the gates of Newbridge I felt I was leaving behind me all and everything in the world which I had loved and cherished.

I was going also, it must be said, not only from a family circle to entire solitude, but also from comparative wealth to poverty. Considering the interests of my eldest brother as paramount, and the seriousness of his charge of keeping up the house and estate, my father left me but a very small patrimony; amounting, at the rate of interest then obtainable, to a trifle over £200 a year. For a woman who had always had every possible service rendered to her by a regiment of well-trained servants, and had had £130 a year pocket-money since she left school, it must be confessed that this was a narrow provision. My father intended me to continue to live at Newbridge with my brother and sister-in-law; but such a plan was entirely contrary to my view of what my life should thenceforth become, and I accepted my poverty cheerfully enough, with the help of a little ready money wherewith to start on my travels. I cut off half my hair, being totally unable to grapple with the whole without a maid, and faced the future with the advantage of the great calm which follows any immediate concern with Death. While that Shadow hangs over our heads we perceive but dimly the thorns and pebbles on our road.

A week after leaving Ireland I spent one night with Harriet St. Leger in lodgings which she and her friend, Miss Dorothy Wilson, occupied on the Marina at St. Leonard’s.