Chapter II: Early Life (1)

I. CHILDHOOD

In the beginning of 1829 my father settled in a house at Kensington Gore--now 42 Hyde Park Gate. There his second son, James Fitzjames, was born on March 3, 1829. James was the name upon which my grandfather insisted because it was his own. My father, because the name was his own, objected as long as he could, but at last compounded, and averted the evil omen, by adding Fitzjames. Two other children, Leslie and Caroline Emelia, were born in 1832 and 1834 at the same house. The Kensington of those days was still distinctly separate from London. A high wall divided Kensington Gardens from the Hounslow Road; there were still deer in the Gardens; cavalry barracks close to Queen's Gate, and a turnpike at the top of the Gloucester Road. The land upon which South Kensington has since arisen was a region of market gardens, where in our childhood we strolled with our nurse along genuine country lanes.

It would be in my power, if it were desirable, to give an unusually minute account of my brother's early childhood. My mother kept a diary, and, I believe, never missed a day for over sixty years. She was also in the habit of compiling from this certain family 'annals' in which she inserted everything that struck her as illustrative of the character of her children. About 1884 my brother himself began a fragment of autobiography, which he continued at intervals during the next two or three years. For various reasons I cannot transfer it as a whole to these pages, but it supplies me with some very important indications.[49] A comparison with my mother's contemporary account of the incidents common to both proves my brother's narrative to be remarkably accurate. Indeed, though he disclaimed the possession of unusual powers of memory in general, he had a singularly retentive memory for facts and dates, and amused himself occasionally by exercising his faculty. He had, for example, a certain walking-stick upon which he made a notch after a day's march; it served instead of a diary, and years afterwards he would explain what was the particular expedition indicated by any one of the very numerous notches.

Although I do not wish to record trifles important only in the eyes of a mother, or interesting only from private associations, I will give enough from these sources to illustrate his early development; or rather to show how much of the later man was already to be found in the infant. It requires perhaps some faith in maternal insight to believe that before he was three months old he showed an uncommon power of 'amusing himself with his own thoughts,' and had 'a calm, composed dignity in his countenance which was quite amusing in so young a creature.' It will be more easily believed that he was healthy and strong, and by the age of six months 'most determined to have his own way.' On August 15, 1830, Wilberforce was looking at the baby, when he woke up, burst into a laugh, and exclaimed 'Funny!' a declaration which Wilberforce no doubt took in good part, though it seems to have been interpreted as a reflection upon the philanthropist's peculiar figure. My brother himself gives a detailed description of his grandfather from an interview which occurred when the old gentleman was seventy-six and the infant very little more than three years old. He remembers even the room and the precise position of the persons present. He remembers too (and his mother's diary confirms the fact) how in the same year he announced that the Reform Bill had 'passed.' It was 'a very fine thing,' he said, being in fact a bill stuck upon a newsboy's hat, inscribed, as his nurse informed him, with the words 'Reform Bill.'

Although his memory implies early powers of observation, he did not show the precocity of many clever children. He was still learning to read about his fifth birthday, and making, as his mother complains, rather slow progress. But if not specially quick at his lessons, he gave very early and, as it seems to me, very noticeable proofs of thoughtfulness and independence of character. He was, as he remained through life, remarkable for that kind of sturdy strength which goes with a certain awkwardness and even sluggishness. To use a modern phrase, he had a great store of 'potential energy,' which was not easily convertible to purposes of immediate application. His mind swarmed with ideas, which would not run spontaneously into the regulation moulds. His mother's influence is perceptible in an early taste for poetry. In his third year he learnt by heart 'Sir John Moore's Burial,' 'Nelson and the North,' Wordsworth's 'Address to the Winds,' and Lord F. L. Gower's translation of Schiller ('When Jove had encircled this planet with light') from hearing his brother's repetition. He especially delighted in this bit of Schiller and in 'Chevy Chase,' though he resisted Watts' hymns. In the next two or three years he learns a good deal of poetry, and on September 5, 1834, repeats fifty lines of Henry the Fifth's speech before Agincourt without a fault. 'Pilgrim's Progress' and 'Robinson Crusoe' are read in due course as his reading improves, and he soon delights in getting into a room by himself and surrounding himself with books. His religious instruction of course began at the earliest possible period, and he soon learnt by heart many simple passages of the Bible. He made his first appearance at family prayers in November 1830, when the ceremony struck him as 'funny,' but he soon became interested and was taught to pray for himself. In 1832 his elder brother has nicknamed him the 'little preacher,' from his love of virtuous admonitions. In 1834 he confides to his mother that he has invented a prayer for himself which is 'not, you know, a childish sort of invention'; and in 1835 he explains that he has followed the advice given in a sermon (he very carefully points out that it was only _advice_, not an order) to pray regularly. Avowals of this kind, however, have to be elicited from him by delicate maternal questioning. He is markedly averse to any display of feeling. 'You should keep your love locked up as I do' is a characteristic remark at the age of four to his eldest brother. The effect of the religious training is apparently perceptible in a great tendency to self-analysis. His thoughts sometimes turn to other problems;--in October, 1835, for example, he asks the question which has occurred to so many thoughtful children,'How do we know that the world is not a dream?'--but he is chiefly interested in his own motives. He complains in January 1834 that he has naughty thoughts. His father tells him to send them away without even thinking about them. He takes the advice, but afterwards explains that he is so proud of sending them away that he 'wants to get them that he may send them away.' He objects to a reward for being good, because it will make him do right from a wrong motive. He shrinks from compliments. In October 1835 he leaves a room where some carpenters were at work because they had said something which he was sorry to have heard. They had said, as it appeared upon anxious inquiry, that he would make a good carpenter, and he felt that he was being cajoled. He remarks that even pleasures become painful when they are ordered, and explains why his sixth birthday was disappointing; he had expected too much.

His thoughtfulness took shapes which made him at times anything but easy to manage. He could be intensely obstinate. The first conflict with authority took place on June 28, 1831, when he resolutely declared that he would not say the 'Busy Bee.' This event became famous in the nursery, for in September 1834 he has to express contrition for having in play used the words 'By the busy bee' as an infantile equivalent to an oath. One difficulty was that he declined to repeat what was put into his mouth, or to take first principles in ethics for granted. When his mother reads a text to him (May 1832), he retorts, 'Then I will not be like a little child; I do not want to go to heaven; I would rather stay on earth.' He declines (in 1834) to join in a hymn which expresses a desire to die and be with God. Even good people, he says, may prefer to stay in this world. 'I don't want to be as good and wise as Tom Macaulay' is a phrase of 1832, showing that even appeals to concrete ideals of the most undeniable excellence fail to overpower him. He gradually developed a theory which became characteristic, and which he obstinately upheld when driven into a logical corner. A stubborn conflict arose in 1833, when his mother was forced to put him in solitary confinement during the family teatime. She overhears a long soliloquy in which he admits his error, contrasts his position with that of the happy who are perhaps even now having toast and sugar, and compares his position to the 'last night of Pharaoh.' 'What a barbarian I am to myself!' he exclaims, and resolves that this shall be his last outbreak. On being set at liberty, he says that he was naughty on purpose, and not only submits but requests to be punished. For a short time he applies spontaneously for punishments, though he does not always submit when the request is granted. But this is a concession under difficulties. His general position is that by punishing him his mother only 'procures him to be much more naughty,' and he declines as resolutely as Jeremy Bentham to admit that naughtiness in itself involves unhappiness, or that the happiness of naughtiness should not be taken into account. He frequently urges that it is pleasanter while it lasts to give way to temper, and that the discomfort only comes afterwards. It follows logically, as he argues in 1835, that if a man could be naughty all his life he would be quite happy. Some time later (1838) he is still arguing the point, having now reached the conclusion to which the Emperor Constantine gave a practical application. The desirable thing would be to be naughty all your life, and to repent just at the end.

These declarations are of course only interpolations in the midst of many more edifying though less original remarks. He was exceedingly conscientious, strongly attached to his parents, and very kind to his younger brother and sister. I note that when he was four years old he already thought it, as he did ever afterwards, one of the greatest of treats to have a solitary talk with his father. He was, however, rather unsociable and earned the nickname of 'Gruffian' for his occasionally surly manner. This, with a stubborn disposition and occasional fits of the sulks, must have made it difficult to manage a child who persisted in justifying 'naughtiness' upon general principles. He was rather inclined to be indolent, and his mother regrets that he is not so persevering as Frederick (Gibbs). His great temptation, he says himself, in his childhood was to be 'effeminate and lazy,' and 'to justify these vices by intellectual and religious excuses.' A great deal of this, he adds, has been 'knocked out of him'; he cannot call himself a sluggard or a hypocrite, nor has he acted like a coward. 'Indeed,' he says, 'from my very infancy I had an instinctive dislike of the maudlin way of looking at things,' and he remembers how in his fifth year he had declared that guns were not 'dreadful things.' They were good if put to the proper uses. I do not think that there was ever much real 'effeminacy' to be knocked out of him. It is too harsh a word for the slowness with which a massive and not very flexible character rouses itself to action. His health was good, except for a trifling ailment which made him for some time pass for a delicate child. But the delicacy soon passed off and for the next fifty years he enjoyed almost unbroken health.

In 1836 he explains some bluntness of behaviour by an argument learnt from 'Sandford and Merton' that politeness is objectionable. In August occurs a fit of obstinacy. He does not want to be forgiven but to be 'happy and comfortable.' 'I do not feel sorry, for I always make the best of my condition in every possible way, and being sorry would make me uncomfortable. That is not to make the best of my condition.' His mother foresees a contest and remarks 'a daring and hardened spirit which is not natural to him.' Soon after, I should perhaps say in consequence of, these outbreaks he was sent to school. My mother's first cousin, Henry Venn Elliott, was incumbent of St. Mary's Chapel at Brighton and a leading evangelical preacher. At Brighton, too, lived his sister, Miss Charlotte Elliott, author of some very popular hymns and of some lively verses of a secular kind. Fitzjames would be under their wing at Brighton, where Elliott recommended a school kept by the Rev. B. Guest, at 7 Sussex Square. My mother took him down by the Brighton coach, and he entered the school on November 10, 1836.[50] The school, says Fitzjames, was in many ways very good; the boys were well taught and well fed. But it was too decorous; there was no fighting and no bullying and rather an excess of evangelical theology. The boys used to be questioned at prayers. 'Gurney, what's the difference between justification and sanctification?' 'Stephen, prove the Omnipotence of God.' Many of the hymns sung by the boys remained permanently in my brother's memory, and he says that he could give the names of all the masters and most of the boys and a history of all incidents in chronological order. Guest's eloquence about justification by faith seems to have stimulated his pupil's childish speculations. He read a tract in which four young men discuss the means of attaining holiness. One says, 'Meditate on the goodness of God'; a second, 'on the happiness of heaven'; a third, 'on the tortures of hell'; and a fourth, 'on the love of Christ.' The last plan was approved in the tract; but Fitzjames thought meditation on hell more to the purpose, and set about it deliberately. He imagined the world transformed into a globe of iron, white hot, with a place in the middle made to fit him so closely that he could not even wink. The globe was split like an orange; he was thrust by an angel into his place, immortal, unconsumable, and capable of infinite suffering; and then the two halves were closed, and he left in hideous isolation to suffer eternal torments. I guess from my own experience that other children have had similar fancies. He adds, however, a characteristic remark. 'It seemed to me then, as it seems now, that no stronger motive, no motive anything like so strong, can be applied to actuate any human creature toward any line of conduct. To compare the love of God or anything else is to my mind simply childish.' He refers to Mill's famous passage about going to hell rather than worship a bad God, and asks what Mill would say after an experience of a quarter of an hour. Fitzjames, however, did not dwell upon such fancies. They were merely the childish mode of speculation by concrete imagery. He became more sociable, played cricket, improved in health, and came home with the highest of characters as being the best and most promising boy in the school. He rose steadily, and seems to have been thoroughly happy for the next five years and a half.

In 1840 my mother observed certain peculiarities in me which she took at first to be indications of precocious genius. After a time, however, she consulted an eminent physician, who informed her that they were really symptoms of a disordered circulation. He added that I was in a fair way to become feeble in mind and deformed in body, and strongly advised that I should be sent to school, where my brain would be in less danger of injudicious stimulation. He declared that even my life was at stake. My father, much alarmed, took one of his prompt decisions. He feared to trust so delicate a child away from home, and therefore resolved to take a house in Brighton for a year or two, from which I might attend my brother's school. The Kensington house was let, and my mother and sister settled in Sussex Square, a few doors from Mr. Guest. My father, unable to leave his work, took a lodging in town and came to Brighton for Sundays, or occasionally twice a week. In those days the journey was still by coach. When the railway began running in the course of 1841, I find my father complaining that it could not be trusted, and had yet made all other modes of travelling impossible. 'How many men turned of fifty,' asks my brother, 'would have put themselves to such inconvenience, discomfort, and separation from their wives for the sake of screening a delicate lad from some of the troubles of a carefully managed boarding school?' My brother was not aware of the apparent gravity of the case when he wrote this. Such a measure would have pushed parental tenderness to weakness had there been only a question of comfort; but my father was seriously alarmed, and I can only think of his conduct with the deepest gratitude.

To Fitzjames the plan brought the advantage that he became his father's companion in Sunday strolls over the Downs. His father now found, as my mother's diary remarks, that he could already talk to him as to a man, and Fitzjames became dimly aware that there were difficulties about Mr. Guest's theology. He went with my father, too, to hear Mr. Sortaine, a popular preacher whose favourite topic was the denunciation of popery. My father explained to the boy that some able men really defended the doctrine of transubstantiation, and my brother, as he remarks, could not then suspect that under certain conditions very able men like nonsense, and are even not averse to 'impudent lying,' in defence of their own authority. Incidentally, too, my father said that there were such people as atheists, but that such views should be treated as we should treat one who insulted the character of our dearest friend. This remark, attributed to a man who was incapable of insulting anyone, and was a friend of such freethinkers as Austin and J. S. Mill, must be regarded as representing the impression made upon an inquisitive child by an answer adapted to his capacity. The impression was, however, very strong, and my brother notes that he heard it on a wettish evening on the cliff near the south end of the old Steine.

Fitzjames had discussed the merits of Mr. Guest's school with great intelligence and had expressed a wish to be sent to Rugby. He had heard bad accounts of the state of Eton, and some rumours of Arnold's influence had reached him. Arnold, someone had told him, could read a boy's character at a glance. At Easter 1841, my father visited the Diceys at Claybrook, and thence took his boy to see the great schoolmaster at Rugby. Fitzjames draws a little diagram to show how distinctly he remembers the scene. He looked at the dark, grave man and wondered, 'Is he now reading my character at a glance?' It does not appear that he was actually entered at Rugby, however, and my father had presently devised another scheme. The inconveniences of the Brighton plan had made themselves felt, and it now occurred to my father that he might take a house in Windsor and send both Fitzjames and me to Eton. We should thus, he hoped, get the advantages of a public school without being exposed to some of its hardships and temptations. He would himself be able to live with his family, although, as things then were, he had to drive daily to and from the Slough station, besides having the double journey from Paddington to Downing Street. We accordingly moved to Windsor in Easter 1842. Fitzjames's last months at school had not been quite so triumphant as the first, partly, it seems, from a slight illness, and chiefly for the characteristic reason, according to his master, that he would occupy himself with 'things too high for him.' He read solid works (I find mention of Carlyle's 'French Revolution') out of school hours and walked with an usher to whom he took a fancy, discoursing upon absorbing topics when he should have been playing cricket. Fitzjames left Brighton on the day, as he notes, upon which one Mister was hanged for attempting murder--being almost the last man in England hanged for anything short of actual murder. He entered Eton on April 15, 1842, and was placed in the 'Remove,' the highest class attainable at his age.

II. ETON

The Eton period[51] had marked effects. Fitzjames owed, as he said, a debt of gratitude to the school, but it was for favours which would have won gratitude from few recipients. The boys at a public school form, I fancy, the most rigidly conservative body in existence. They hate every deviation from the accepted type with the hatred of an ancient orthodox divine for a heretic. The Eton boys of that day regarded an 'up-town boy' with settled contempt. His motives or the motives of his parents for adopting so abnormal a scheme were suspect. He might be the son of a royal footman or a prosperous tradesman in Windsor, audaciously aspiring to join the ranks of his superiors, and if so, clearly should be made to know his place. In any case he was exceptional, and therefore a Pariah, to associate with whom might be dangerous to one's caste. Mr. Coleridge tells me that even the school authorities were not free from certain suspicions. They wisely imagined, it appears, that my father had come among them as a spy, instigated, no doubt, by some diabolical design of 'reforming' the school and desecrating the shrine of Henry's holy shade. The poor man, already overpowered by struggling with refractory colonists from Heligoland to New Zealand, was of malice prepense stirring up this additional swarm of hornets. I can hardly suppose, however, that this ingenious theory had much influence. Mr. Coleridge also says that the masters connived at the systematic bullying of the town boys. I can believe that they did not systematically repress it. I must add, however, in justice to my school-fellows, that my personal recollections do not reveal any particular tyranny. Such bullying as I had to endure was very occasional, and has left no impression on my memory. Yet I was far less capable than Fitzjames of defending myself, and can hardly have forgotten any serious tormenting. The truth is that the difference between me and my brother was the difference between the willow and the oak, and that I evaded such assaults as he met with open defiance.

My brother, as has been indicated, was far more developed in character, if not in scholarship, than is at all common at his age. His talks with my father and his own reading had familiarised him with thoughts lying altogether beyond the horizon of the average boyish mind. He was thoughtful beyond his years, although not conspicuously forward in the school studies. He was already inclined to consider games as childish. He looked down upon his companions and the school life generally as silly and frivolous. The boys resented his contempt of their ways; and his want of sociability and rather heavy exterior at the time made him a natural butt for schoolboy wit. He was, he says, bullied and tormented till, towards the end of his time, he plucked up spirit to resist. Of the bullying there can be no doubt; nor (sooner or later) of the resistance. Mr. Coleridge observes that he was anything but a passive victim, and turned fiercely upon the ringleaders of his enemies. 'Often,' he adds, 'have I applauded his backhanders as the foremost in the fray. He was only vanquished by numbers. His bill for hats at Sanders' must have amounted to a stiff figure, for my visions of Fitzjames are of a discrowned warrior, returning to Windsor bareheaded, his hair moist with the steam of recent conflict.' My own childish recollections of his school life refer mainly to pugilism. In October 1842, as I learn from my mother's diary, he found a big boy bullying me, and gave the boy such a thrashing as was certain to prevent a repetition of the crime. I more vividly recollect another occasion, when a strong lad was approaching me with hostile intent. I can still perceive my brother in the background; when an application of the toe of his boot between the tails of my tyrant's coat disperses him instantaneously into total oblivion. Other scenes dimly rise up, as of a tumult in the school-yard, where Fitzjames was encountering one of the strongest boys in the school amidst a delighted crowd, when the appearance of the masters stopped the proceedings. Fitzjames says that in his sixteenth year (i.e. 1844-5) he grew nearly five inches, and instead of outgrowing his strength became a 'big, powerful young man, six feet high,'--and certainly a very formidable opponent.

Other boys have had similar experiences without receiving the same impression. 'I was on the whole,' he says, 'very unhappy at Eton, and I deserved it; for I was shy, timid, and I must own cowardly. I was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys.' After speaking of his early submission to tyranny, he adds: 'I still think with shame and self-contempt of my boyish weakness, which, however, did not continue in later years. The process taught me for life the lesson that to be weak is to be wretched, that the state of nature is a state of war, and _Væ Victis_ the great law of Nature. Many years afterwards I met R. Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) at dinner. He was speaking of Winchester, and said with much animation that he had learnt one great lesson there, namely, that a man can count on nothing in this world except what lies between his hat and his boots. I learnt the same lesson at Eton, but alas! by conjugating not _pulso_ but _vapulo_.' As I have intimated, I think that his conscience must have rather exaggerated his sins of submission; though I also cannot doubt that there was some ground for his self-humiliation. In any case, he atoned for it fully. I must add that he learnt another lesson, which, after his fashion, he refrains from avowing. The 'kicks, cuffs, and hat smashing had no other result,' says Mr. Coleridge, 'than to steel his mind for ever against oppression, tyranny, and unfairness of every kind.' How often that lesson is effectually taught by simple bullying I will not inquire. Undoubtedly Fitzjames learnt it, though he expressed himself more frequently in terms of indignation against the oppressor than of sympathy for the oppressed; but the sentiment was equally strong, and I have no doubt that it was stimulated by these acts of tyranny.

The teaching at Eton was 'wretched'; the hours irregular and very unpunctual; the classes were excessively large, and the tutorial instruction supposed to be given out of school frequently neglected. 'I do not believe,' says my brother, 'that I was ever once called upon to construe at my tutor's after I got into the fifth form.' An absurd importance, too, was already attached to the athletic amusements. Balston, our tutor, was a good scholar after the fashion of the day and famous for Latin verse; but he was essentially a commonplace don. 'Stephen major,' he once said to my brother, 'if you do not take more pains, how can you ever expect to write good longs and shorts? If you do not write good longs and shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If you are not a man of taste, how can you ever hope to be of use in the world?'--a _sorites_, says my brother, which must, he thinks, be somewhere defective.

The school, however, says Fitzjames, had two good points. The boys, in the first place, were gentlemen by birth and breeding, and did not forget their home training. The simple explanation of the defects of the school was, as he remarks, that parents in this class did not care about learning; they wished their children to be gentlemen, and to be 'bold and active, and to make friends and to enjoy themselves, and most of them had their wish.'

The second good point in the school is more remarkable. 'There was,' says Fitzjames, 'a complete absence of moral and religious enthusiasm. The tone of Rugby was absolutely absent.' Chapel was simply a kind of drill. He vividly remembers a sermon delivered by one of the Fellows, a pompous old gentleman, who solemnly gave out the bidding prayer, and then began in these words, 'which ring in my ears after the lapse of more than forty years.' 'The subject of my discourse this morning, my brethren, will be the duties of the married state.' When Balston was examined before a Public Schools Commission, he gave what Fitzjames considers 'a perfectly admirable answer to one question.' He had said that the Provost and Fellows did all the preaching, and was asked whether he did not regret that he could not, as headmaster, use this powerful mode of influencing the boys? 'No,' he said; 'I was always of opinion that nothing was so important for boys as the preservation of Christian simplicity.' 'This put into beautiful language,' says my brother, 'the truth that at Eton there was absolutely no nonsense.' The masters knew that they had 'nothing particular to teach in the way of morals or religion, and they did not try to do so.'

The merits thus ascribed to Eton were chiefly due, it seems, to the neglect of discipline and of teaching. My brother infers that good teaching at school is of less importance than is generally supposed. I shall not enter upon that question; but it is necessary to point out that whatever the merits of an entire absence of moral and religious instruction, my brother can hardly be taken as an instance. At this time the intimacy with his father, already close, was rapidly developing. On Sunday afternoons, in particular, my father used to walk to the little chapel near Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Park, and on the way would delight in the conversations which so profoundly interested his son. The boy's mind was ripening, and he was beginning to take an interest in some of the questions of the day. It was the time of the Oxford movement, and discussions upon that topic were frequent at home. Frederick Gibbs held for a time a private tutorship at Eton while reading for a fellowship at Trinity, and brought news of what was exciting young men at the Universities. A quaint discussion recalled by my brother indicates one topic which even reached the schoolboy mind. He was arguing as to confirmation with Herbert Coleridge (1830-1861) whose promising career as a philologist was cut short by an early death. 'If you are right,' said Fitzjames, 'a bishop could not confirm with his gloves on.' 'No more he could,' retorted Coleridge, boldly accepting the position. Political questions turned up occasionally. O'Connell was being denounced as 'the most impudent of created liars,' and a belief in Free Trade was the mark of a dangerous radical. To the Eton time my brother also refers a passionate contempt for the 'sentimental and comic' writers then popular. He was disgusted not only by their sentimentalism but by their vulgarity and their ridicule of all that he respected.

One influence, at this time, mixed oddly with that exerted by my father. My eldest brother, Herbert, had suffered from ill health, due, I believe, to a severe illness in his infancy, which had made it impossible to give him a regular education. He had grown up to be a tall, large-limbed man, six feet two-and-a-half inches in height, but loosely built, and with a deformity of one foot which made him rather awkward. The delicacy of his constitution had caused much anxiety and trouble, and he diverged from our family traditions by insisting upon entering the army. There, as I divine, he was the object of a good deal of practical joking, and found himself rather out of his element. He used to tell a story which may have received a little embroidery in tradition. He was at a ball at Gibraltar, which was attended by a naval officer. When the ladies had retired this gentleman proposed pistol shooting. After a candelabrum had been smashed, the sailor insisted upon taking a shot at a man who was lying on a sofa, and lodged a bullet in the wall just above his head. Herbert left the army about 1844 and entered at Gray's Inn. He would probably have taken to literature, and he wrote a few articles not without promise, but his life was a short one. He was much at Windsor, and the anxiety which he had caused, as well as a great sweetness and openness of temper, made him, I guess, the most tenderly loved of his parents' children. He had, however, wandered pretty widely outside the limits of the Clapham Sect. He became very intimate with Fitzjames, and they had long and frank discussions. This daring youth doubted the story of Noah's flood, and one phrase which stuck in his brother's mind is significant. 'You,' he said, 'are a good boy, and I suppose you will go to heaven. If you can enjoy yourself there when you think of me and my like grilling in hell fire, upon my soul I don't envy you.' One other little glance from a point of view other than that of Clapham impressed the lad. He found among his father's books a copy of 'State Trials,' and there read the trial of Williams for publishing Paine's 'Age of Reason.' The extracts from Paine impressed him; though, for a time, he had an impression from his father that Coleridge and other wise men had made a satisfactory apology for the Bible; and 'in his inexperience' he thought that Paine's coarseness implied a weak case. 'There is a great deal of truth,' he says, 'in a remark made by Paine. I have gone through the Bible as a man might go through a wood, cutting down the trees. The priests can stick them in again, but they will not make them grow.' For the present such thoughts remained without result. Fitzjames was affected, he says, by the combined influence of his father and brother. He thought that something was to be said on both sides of the argument. Meanwhile the anxiety caused to his father by Herbert's unfortunately broken, though in no sense discreditable, career impressed him with a strong sense of the evils of all irregularities of conduct. He often remembered Herbert in connection with one of his odd anniversaries. 'This day eighteen years ago,' he says (September 16, 1857), 'my brother Herbert and I killed a snake in Windsor Forest. Poor dear fellow! we should have been great friends, and please God! we shall be yet.'

Meanwhile Fitzjames had done well, though not brilliantly, at school. He was eighth in his division, of which he gives the first twelve names from memory. The first boy was Chenery, afterwards editor of the 'Times,' and the twelfth was Herbert Coleridge. With the exception of Coleridge, his cousin Arthur, and W. J. Beamont (1828-1868), who at his death was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had hardly any intimates. Chitty, afterwards his colleague on the Bench, was then famous as an athlete; but with athletics my brother had nothing to do. His only amusement of that kind was the solitary sport of fishing. He caught a few roach and dace, and vainly endeavoured to inveigle pike. His failure was caused, perhaps, by scruples as to the use of live bait, which led him to look up some elaborate recipes in Walton's 'Compleat Angler.' Pike, though not very intelligent, have long seen through those ancient secrets.

One of these friendships led to a characteristic little incident. In the Christmas holidays of 1844 Fitzjames was invited to stay with the father of his friend Beamont, who was a solicitor at Warrington. There could not, as I had afterwards reason to know, have been a quieter or simpler household. But they had certain gaieties. Indeed, if my memory does not deceive me, Fitzjames there made his first and only appearance upon the stage in the character of Tony Lumpkin. My father was alarmed by the reports of these excesses, and, as he was going to the Diceys, at Claybrook, wrote to my brother of his intentions. He hinted that Fitzjames, if he were at liberty, might like a visit to his cousins. Upon arriving at Rugby station he found Fitzjames upon the platform. The lad had at once left Warrington, though a party had been specially invited for his benefit, having interpreted the paternal hint in the most decisive sense. My father, I must add, was shocked by the results of his letter, and was not happy till he had put himself right with the innocent Beamonts.

Under Balston's advice Fitzjames was beginning to read for the Newcastle. Before much progress had been made in this, however, my father discovered his son's unhappiness at school. Although the deep designs of reform with which the masters seem to have credited him were purely imaginary, my father had no high opinion of Eton, and devised another scheme. Fitzjames went to the school for the last time about September 23, 1845, and then tore off his white necktie and stamped upon it. He went into the ante-chapel and scowled, he says, at the boys inside, not with a benediction. It was the close of three years to which he occasionally refers in his letters, and always much in the same terms. They were, in the main, unhappy, and, as he emphatically declared, the only unhappy years of his life, but they had taught him a lesson.

III. KING'S COLLEGE

On October 1, 1845, he entered King's College, London. Lodgings were taken for him at Highgate Hill, within a few doors of his uncle, Henry Venn. He walked the four miles to the college, dined at the Colonial Office at two, and returned by the omnibus. He was now his own master, the only restriction imposed upon him being that he should every evening attend family prayers at his uncle's house. The two years he spent at King's College were, he says, 'most happy.' He felt himself changed from a boy to a man. The King's College lads, who, indeed called themselves 'men,' were of a lower social rank than the Etonians, and, as Fitzjames adds, unmistakably inferior in physique. Boys who had the Strand as the only substitute for the playing-fields were hardly likely to show much physical prowess. But they had qualities more important to him. They were industrious, as became the sons of professional and business men. Their moral tone was remarkably good; he never knew, he says, a more thoroughly well-behaved set of lads, although he is careful to add that he does not think that in this respect Eton was bad. His whole education had been among youths 'singularly little disposed to vice or a riot in any form.' But the great change for him was that he could now find intellectual comradeship. There was a debating society, in which he first learnt to hear his own voice, and indeed became a prominent orator. He is reported to have won the surname 'Giant Grim.' His most intimate friend was the present Dr. Kitchin, Dean of Durham. The lads discussed politics and theology and literature, instead of putting down to affectation any interest outside of the river and the playing-fields. Fitzjames not only found himself in a more congenial atmosphere, but could hold his own better among youths whose standard of scholarship was less exalted than that of the crack Latin versemakers at Eton, although the average level was perhaps higher. In 1846 he won a scholarship, and at the summer examination was second in classics. In 1847 he was only just defeated for a scholarship by an elder boy, and was first, both in classics and English literature, in the examinations, besides winning a prize essay.

Here, as elsewhere, he was much interested by the theological tone of his little circle, which was oddly heterogeneous. There was, in the first place, his uncle, Henry Venn, to whom he naturally looked up as the exponent of the family orthodoxy. Long afterwards, upon Venn's death, he wrote, 'Henry Venn was the most triumphant man I ever knew.' 'I never,' he adds, 'knew a sturdier man.' Such qualities naturally commanded his respect, though he probably was not an unhesitating disciple. At King's College, meanwhile, which prided itself upon its Anglicanism, he came under a very different set of teachers. The principal, Dr. Jelf, represented the high and dry variety of Anglicanism. I can remember how, a little later, I used to listen with wonder to his expositions of the Thirty-nine Articles. What a marvellous piece of good fortune it was, I used dimly to consider, that the Church of England had always hit off precisely the right solution in so many and such tangled controversies! But King's College had a professor of a very different order in F. D. Maurice. His personal charm was remarkable, and if Fitzjames did not become exactly a disciple he was fully sensible of Maurice's kindness of nature and loftiness of purpose. He held, I imagine, in a vague kind of way, that here might perhaps be the prophet who was to guide him across the deserts of infidelity into the promised land where philosophy and religion will be finally reconciled. Of this, however, I shall have more to say hereafter.

I must now briefly mention the changes which took place at this time in our family. In 1846 my brother Herbert made a tour to Constantinople, and on his return home was seized by a fever and died at Dresden on October 22. My father and mother had started upon the first news of the illness, but arrived too late to see their son alive. Fitzjames in the interval came to Windsor, and, as my mother records, was like a father to the younger children. The journey to Dresden, with its terrible suspense and melancholy end, was a severe blow to my father. From that time, as it seems to me, he was a changed man. He had already begun to think of retiring from his post, and given notice that he must be considered as only holding it during the convenience of his superiors.[52] He gave up the house at Windsor, having, indeed, kept it on chiefly because Herbert was fond of the place. We settled for a time at Wimbledon. There my brother joined us in the early part of 1847. A very severe illness in the autumn of 1847 finally induced my father to resign his post. In recognition of his services he was made a privy councillor and K.C.B. His retirement was at first provisional, and, on recovering, he was anxious to be still employed in some capacity. The Government of the day considered the pension to which he was entitled an inadequate reward for his services. There was some talk of creating the new office of Assessor to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, to which he was to be appointed. This proved to be impracticable, but his claim was partly recognised in his appointment to succeed William Smyth (died June 26, 1849) as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.[53] I may as well mention here the later events of his life, as they will not come into any precise connection with my brother's history. The intimacy between the two strengthened as my brother developed into manhood, and they were, as will be seen, in continual intercourse. But after leaving King's College my brother followed his own lines, though for a time an inmate of our household.

The Kensington house having been let, we lived in various suburban places, and, for a time, at Cambridge. My father's professorship occupied most of his energies in later years. He delivered his first course in the May term of 1850. Another very serious illness, threatening brain fever, interrupted him for a time, and he went abroad in the autumn of 1850. He recovered, however, beyond expectation, and was able to complete his lectures in the winter, and deliver a second course in the summer of 1851. These lectures were published in 1852 as 'Lectures on the History of France.' They show, I think, the old ability, but show also some failure of the old vivacity. My father did not possess the profound antiquarian knowledge which is rightly demanded in a professor of the present day; and, indeed, I think it is not a little remarkable that, in the midst of his absorbing work, he had acquired so much historical reading as they display. But, if I am not mistaken, the lectures have this peculiar merit--that they are obviously written by a man who had had vast practical experience of actual administrative work. They show, therefore, an unusual appreciation of the constitutional side of French history; and he anticipated some of the results set forth with, of course, far greater knowledge of the subject, in Tocqueville's 'Ancien Régime.' Tocqueville himself wrote very cordially to my father upon the subject; and the lectures have been valued by very good judges. Nothing, however, could be more depressing than the position of a professor at Cambridge at that time. The first courses delivered by my father were attended by a considerable number of persons capable of feeling literary curiosity--a class which was then less abundant than it would now be at Cambridge. But he very soon found that his real duty was to speak to young gentlemen who had been driven into his lecture-room by well-meant regulations; who were only anxious to secure certificates for the 'poll' degree, and whose one aim was to secure them on the cheapest possible terms. To candidates for honours, the history school was at best a luxury for which they could rarely spare time, and my father had to choose between speaking over the heads of his audience and giving milk and water to babes. The society of the Cambridge dons in those days was not much to his taste, and he soon gave up residence there.

About the beginning of 1853 he took a house in Westbourne Terrace, which became his headquarters. In 1855 he accepted a professorship at Haileybury, which was then doomed to extinction, only to hold it during the last three years of the existence of the college. These lectures sufficiently occupied his strength, and he performed them to the best of his ability. The lectures upon French history were, however, the last performance which represented anything like his full powers.

IV. CAMBRIDGE

In October 1847 my brother went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. 'My Cambridge career,' he says, 'was not to me so memorable or important a period of life as it appears to some people.' He seems to have extended the qualification to all his early years. 'Few men,' he says, 'have worked harder than I have for the last thirty-five years, but I was a very lazy, unsystematic lad up to the age of twenty-two.' He would sometimes speak of himself as 'one of a slowly ripening race,' and set little value upon the intellectual acquirements attained during the immature period. Yet I have sufficiently shown that in some respects he was even exceptionally developed. From his childhood he had shared the thoughts of his elders; he had ceased to be a boy when he had left Eton at sixteen; and he came up to Cambridge far more of a grown man than nine in ten of his contemporaries. So far, indeed, as his character was concerned, he had scarcely ever been a child: at Cambridge, as at Eton, he regarded many of the ambitions of his contemporaries as puerile. Even the most brilliant undergraduates are sometimes tempted to set an excessive value upon academical distinction. A senior wranglership appears to them to be the culminating point of human glory, instead of the first term in the real battle of life. Fitzjames, far from sharing this delusion, regarded it, perhaps, with rather too much contempt. His thoughts were already upon his future career, and he cared for University distinctions only as they might provide him with a good start in the subsequent competition. But this marked maturity of character did not imply the possession of corresponding intellectual gifts, or, as I should rather say, of such gifts as led to success in the Senate House. Fitzjames had done respectably at Eton, and had been among the first lads at King's College. He probably came up to Cambridge with confidence that he would make a mark in examinations. But his mind, however powerful, was far from flexible. He had not the intellectual docility which often enables a clever youth to surpass rivals of much greater originality--as originality not unfrequently tempts a man outside the strait and narrow path which leads to the maximum of marks. 'I have always found myself,' says Fitzjames, in reference to his academical career, 'one of the most unteachable of human beings. I cannot, to this day, take in anything at second hand. I have in all cases to learn whatever I want to learn in a way of my own. It has been so with law, with languages, with Indian administration, with the machinery I have had to study in patent cases, with English composition--in a word, with everything whatever.' For other reasons, however, he was at a disadvantage. He not only had not yet developed, but he never at any time possessed, the intellectual qualities most valued at Cambridge.

The Cambridge of those days had merits, now more likely to be overlooked than overvalued. The course was fitted to encourage strenuous masculine industry, love of fair play, and contempt for mere showy displays of cleverness. But it must be granted that it was strangely narrow. The University was not to be despised which could turn out for successive senior wranglers from 1840 to 1843 such men as Leslie Ellis, Sir George Stokes, Professor Cayley, and Adams, the discoverer of Neptune, while the present Lord Kelvin was second wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1845. During the same period the great Latin scholar, Munro (1842), and H. S. Maine (1844), were among the lights of the Classical Tripos. But, outside of the two Triposes, there was no career for a man of any ability. To parody a famous phrase of Hume's, Cambridge virtually said to its pupils, 'Is this a treatise upon geometry or algebra? No. Is it, then, a treatise upon Greek or Latin grammar, or on the grammatical construction of classical authors? No. Then commit it to the flames, for it contains nothing worth your study.' Now, in both these arenas Fitzjames was comparatively feeble. He read classical books, not only at Cambridge but in later life, when he was pleased to find his scholarship equal to the task of translating. But he read them for their contents, not from any interest in the forms of language. He was without that subtlety and accuracy of mind which makes the born scholar. He was capable of blunders surprising in a man of his general ability; and every blunder takes away marks. He was still less of a mathematician. 'I disliked,' as he says himself, 'and foolishly despised the studies of the place, and did not care about accurate classical scholarship, in which I was utterly wrong. I was clumsy at calculation, though I think I have, and always have had, a good head for mathematical principles; and I utterly loathed examinations, which seem to me to make learning all but impossible.'