has helped to turn the Gloucester of then into
the mere big railway station, with appendages,
of now. But long before these public happenings
I had paid many a visit to the Basin in the
companionship of my Uncle Tom, who was not
only the harbour-master but a naval lieutenant
with a medal for service in the American war
of 1813-15, of which I was exceedingly proud.
Nor was my wondering interest in the ships
with mysterious foreign names, and their out-
landish crews, degraded into prose by explanatory
lectures ; for Uncle Tom was the most silent
of men. As a mathematician he had solved
problems, and as a fine swimmer he had saved
lives : but he never told. I do not think that
the foreign sailors were popular. The French
sailors, in particular, were accused of the abomina-
tion, to the homely wits of the then homekeeping
British mind, of eating snails. They had been
x6
Gloucester in the 'Forties
actually seen gathering those creatures in sacks,
at early morning. The accusation was doubtless
true : and I hope they had the occasional luck
to meet with some of the grand white snails
ancestrally imported by the Roman grandees,
and still plentiful among the many remains of
baths and villas not far away.
I have casually spoken of Gloucester in the
'forties as dull, but that is only from the present
point of view. There is no reason for assuming
that it found itself so. Twice or thrice a year the
Judges of Assize were met in state at Over Bridge
on their way from Monmouth by the High Sheriff
of the County, and conducted into the City by an
escort of mounted trumpeters and javelin men.
The Oxford Circuit ended there : so what with
barristers, attorneys, witnesses, jurymen, plaintiffs,
defendants, and so forth, innkeepers at any rate,
and citizens with lodgings to let, had anything
but a dull time. Then every third year Glou-
cester took its turn in the Festival of the Three
Choirs, now among the chief annual events of
the musical world at large, and already of high
local prestige and fashion, bringing the carriages,
toilettes, and purses of the County people into
the County town — Worcester, Hereford, or Glou-
cester as the turn might be. Of this, my own
earlier memories have nothing to say. They
c 17
Mid-Victorian Memories
are, however, busy enough with the vanished or
vanishing excitements that came in my way.
There was May Day, for example, when the
chimney sweeps, three of the party grotesquely
got up as Jack-in-the-Green (a moving mass of
foliage), Maid Marian, and Clown, danced about
the streets to a pan-pipe and tambourine, the
latter serving also for more or less voluntary
contributions. There was Whit-Monday, when
the Friendly Societies marched in solemn pro-
cession with banners and scarves. But, chief
among all the glories of the year, was Michaelmas-
tide, for it brought Barton Fair.
I do not know its history : it was in all likeli-
hood originally held just without the old East
Gate, but its legal limits had come to include a
considerable portion of one of the main streets
of the city. What this meant in the years that
I am recalling may be judged from its being for
pleasure as well as for business, with a " Mop "
for hiring farm servants to follow, and that
among the privileges of the inhabitants of its
limits was that of selling beer without a licence
during the continuance of the Fair. The privi-
lege was exercised freely, those who took the
benefit of it hanging out a bush for a sign.
Whether the proverb referring to the custom
referred also to the excellence of the liquor sold
i8
Barton Fair
may be open to question. The hiring of a farm
servant was for the twelve months following the
fair : to many such, Barton Fair was the solitary
dissipation of the year, and a man who had drunk
nothing better than rough, muddy cider since last
" Mop" was not likely to be particular as to the
quality of his ale. I believe that, in fact.
Barton Fair, old style, was very much of an
orgie, where, while the need for a licence, with
a C, was suspended, a good deal of license, with
an S, was allowed. None the less, beyond any
question there was plenty of at any rate out-
wardly harmless if bewilderingly boisterous enter-
tainment in being taken for a stroll through
the fair during the — comparatively — sober part
of the day. The stentorian patter of the cheap-
jacks, the banging of big drums emphasising the
vociferations of rival showmen, the cracking of
whips, and the startling thud when some marks-
man won a handful of nuts for his sweetheart by
accidentally scoring a bull's eye from a gun-barrel
calculated to miss the more widely the better it
was aimed — all these blended with the voices of
the crowd in a feast for the ear. The smock-frock
was still the common costume of country folk,
who would have helped Hogarth to many a group
by hanging sheepishly round the roulette tables,
or more recklessly defying fortune by swaggering
19
Mid- Victorian Memories
about with ribbons streaming from their hats, to
show that they had taken, and evidently spent,
the Queen's shilHng ; for the recruiting sergeant
was well to the fore. The same pencil would
assuredly — though I am not an eye-witness on
this point — have found thoroughly congenial
subjects in the interiors of the booths devoted to
the consumption of roast pork and roast goose,
the special menu of the occasion. Among the
equally indispensable adjuncts of the festival were
the stalls for the sale of " Parliament " : un-
accountably named pieces of gingerbread in
conventionalised shapes of birds, beasts, or fishes,
and partially gilded. So another proverbial
expression, " to take the gilt off the ginger-
bread," was visibly explained. I never saw the
inevitable fat lady or calf with too many legs —
indeed, nothing would have induced me to see
them, for the mere thought of any deformity,
much more of monstrosity, used to give me actual
nausea. Had some untrustworthy guardian taken
me into such a show, I should have kept my eyes
tight shut till I came out again. There was
another thing, too, which I did not like, but could
not avoid. I had a most uncomfortably sensitive
sense of smell, and the innumerable ropes ot
onions, apparently monopolising the commerce ot
the fair, and never out of sight and scent, added
20
Sights of Barton Fair
pungency to an atmosphere quite strongly enough
flavoured without them.
But there is one personage whom Barton Fair
enables me to add to my recollections without
any drawback, and of whom I wish my age
at the time under remembrance could have
enabled me to add more. He was the strolling
player : not the regularly engaged and salaried
lady or gentleman ("He" does not exclude
" She ") of the organised tour, but the still
extant stroller who might have stepped straight
out of one of Goldsmith's pages. I do wish
that I had been old enough to make his acquaint-
ance before it was too late. It is something,
however, to have seen him, and her, act in a
booth at a fair. Perhaps somebody better versed
than I in the history of the stage will inform
me of the plot and title of the particular drama
now in my mind. It could not, as I remember
the rapidity of the preliminary business, have
lasted many minutes, so that the three unities
of time, place, and action must have been
extra-scrupulously observed. The great scene
was a terrible single combat, at any rate a
frantic clashing of swords, between two pre-
sumable rivals for the love of a decidedly elderly
lady who looked on at the duel dressed in what
looked like a not over-clean nightgown and
21
Mid-Victorian Memories
with dishevelled hair. The effect, however, was
somewhat damaged, and the denouement antici-
pated. The front bench on which the elite of
the audience (including myself) sat, suddenly-
collapsed, and left us sprawling.
It must not be supposed, however, that my
earlier outlook was wholly confined by the
boundaries of my native city, or that my only
notion of the drama was derived from a booth
at a fair. My mother's parents, with one of her
brothers and three of her sisters (she was the
eldest of twelve, the others being married and
scattered), lived in Queen Square, Bloomsbury,
which at that time, though its fashion was of
the past, was a highly respectable — what its
early Victorian inhabitants no doubt termed
" genteel " — abode for prosperous lawyers and
other professional men. Its spacious rooms and
broad staircases with polished floors, and its not
being on the way to anywhere, gave it a character
of quiet dignity in keeping with its denizens.
One entire end of the square was occupied by the
bigf house of the Lord Chief Baron, Sir Frederick
Pollock ; it had need to be big, if his nineteen
living sons and daughters were ever there
together. My grandfather, a kindly old gentle-
man who had spent his 'teens in the Navy, held
22
Queen Square, Bloomsbury
one of the afterwards abolished and pensioned-
off offices of the Court of Chancery ; its duties,
so far as I could make out, consisted in luncheon,
reading the Times^ and taking snuff, from some
time later than ten to some time earlier than
four. A next-door neighbour and acquaintance
was a solicitor in large practice : and these three
may be taken as typical representatives of the
Square, presided over, at the centre of its railed
and unfrequented garden, by a weather-beaten
and peculiarly ugly statue of Queen Anne. I
used to be sometimes sent to play in the garden
with nobody but Queen Anne for company ; and
what she and I could possibly find to play at
all by ourselves I can neither remember nor
imagine, I suppose she is still there ; I would
go and see, if it were not that places with
memories are best avoided. All the life is
frozen out of them by the slightest change. No
doubt I should find the church in the corner
which I regarded with respectful interest, inas-
much as my parents had been married there.
The story went that, as the church was no more
than ten doors distant from the bride's home,
her carriage, in order to maintain the full prestige
and dignity of such an occasion, reached it by
making twice the round of the Square, and this
in a fall of snow. The only house out of keeping
23
Mid- Victorian Memories
with the spirit of the place was one tenanted
by some Sisters of Mercy, exciting in me a
curiosity that nobody seemed willing to satisfy.
Perhaps nobody was able. I think they were
regarded as undesirable aliens : a blot upon the
otherwise immaculate respectability of the Square.
Not all, however, of my early memories of life
in London are cased in the almost prae- Victorian
mahogany round which Bloomsbury used to dine
at five. They include the Lyceum of Madame
Vestris and Charles Mathews : truly a stride
of seven-leagued boots from where I left myself
sprawling in the booth at Barton Fair. Of
Mathews, on that first occasion, or of the parts
he played, I can recall nothing definite but a
flow of words too fast to follow : of Vestris, in
the extravaganza of " The Seven Champions of
Christendom," only a glorified vision. But I
knew all about the Champions of Christendom
from another source : and, in spite of the excite-
ment, and the vision, and the scenic splendour,
I know that I was a good deal put out by what
seemed to me the unpardonably ignorant liberties
taken with the familiar legend. I never passed
through the stage-struck phase : not even my
first pantomime inspired me with a minute's
wish to be a Clown ; and in matters dramatic
I have always been deplorably hard to please —
24
Playgoer and Critic
even when constrained to admit an unsurpassable
best, I have nearly always wanted something
more and better. Yet I think my first experience
as playgoer and critic to be not uncommon. Were
I to dramatise a legend or fairy tale I would
stick as tight and close to the received text as
if I myself were still a child — a real child, that is
to say, to whom the cleverest up-to-date adapta-
tions, however splendidly produced, are without
the soul of the stories which, having read or heard,
he wants to see exactly as they were read or
heard — nothing left out, nothing needlessly put in.
If I record so trite and inevitable a recollection
as a visit to Madame Tussaud's, then lodged
in Baker Street in almost homely style, it is
for a special reason. I had been taken there
by one of my aunts, and as we were going out
a little old lady in black, standing at the door
of the gallery, stooped down and kissed me.
It was Madame Tussaud herself: the original
Madame, who had known and modelled Voltaire,
who was born in 1694. That kiss therefore sets
but a single life between myself and one who
was born 219 years ago. Only nine years more
would as closely have linked me with the reign
of King James II., the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, and the consequent emigration of my
Huguenot ancestors from the banks of the Rhone.
25
CHAPTER III
My father and his brothers — Serjeant Talfourd — Edward
Lear — Origin of " The Book of Nonsense " — His celibacy
James Francillon, my father, born in 1802, was
the son of an officer in the Navy who died, on
service, at Lisbon in or about i8i8, and the
youngest of six brothers. The eldest of these,
Francis — our eldest sons are always christened
Francis, and sometimes all the other sons as
well — was quite recently, and perhaps is still,
remembered at Banbury, where he settled and
practised, as an able solicitor with a talent for
advocacy, who, out of sheer animal spirits, defied
ordinary professional convenances with a zest that
acquired for him the privilege of having his
eccentricities taken for granted, as in the natural
order of things. He was, in fact, a strongly
developed specimen of what in the time of Queen
Anne (herself, not her statue) was known as a
" humorist " : one who follows his own humours,
without caring a straw what may be thought of
him or them. That he of all men had married
a strict, old-fashioned Quakeress is almost as
26
My Father and his Brothers
humoursome a meeting of extremes as that such
a Quakeress, of all women, had married him.
He was the author of a treatise on Punctuation,
based on a theory, more original and ingenious
than practically useful, of his own. I never saw
much of " Uncle Frank." My most vivid por-
trait of him is taken from a later chapter of my
reminiscences than the present, when we walked
together along the High Street of Oxford, I in
wig and gown, he in his habitual substitute for a
great-coat — a primitive sort of poncho, contrived
by roughly cutting a head-hole in the middle of
an old horse-cloth of conspicuous pattern and
colours. The four brothers between the eldest and
youngest all belonged to the Navy. Uncle Tom
I have already mentioned. Uncle John, with the
title of Commander, was, in my time, in business
at Gloucester as a shipbroker. Neither was
married. My uncles Charles and Philip were before
my time. The former had died in Newfound-
land; the latter had been drowned by the capsizing
of a boat in Portsmouth Harbour. Yet, though
thus both my grandfathers and four of my five
paternal uncles were sailors, and ships among my
earliest memories, I never for a moment felt any
more inclination for the sea than for the stage.
My father was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn,
and obtained considerable business on the Oxford
27
Mid- Victorian Memories
Circuit, occupying chambers in Southampton
Buildings off Chancery Lane during Term, and
practising locally at other times. His speciality,
unusual and therefore advantageous at the Com-
mon Law Bar, was the Law of Real Property :
and he has a place in the Dictionary of National
Biography as the author of " Lectures Elementary
and Familiar on English Law." He was among
the first-appointed County Court Judges, and
soon afterwards removed from Gloucester to
Cheltenham ; a change of surroundings which,
to myself at least, was like going into another,
but I cannot add better, world. For, transformed
as it is, I still retain a native affection for the
ancient and historic City of the Cathedral and
the Severn : none for the fine and fashionable
upstart eight miles away, though my home was
there for some eighteen years. I was ^the one,
never more than at the other.
Assize time would sometimes bring a Circuit
friend of my father's over those eight miles to
dinner. The visit of one of these I especially
remember. I can see him now, as he stood on
the hearthrug, punchy and red-faced ; but his
voice has faded away, though I remember voices
better than faces as a rule. This was Serjeant,
almost immediately afterwards Mr. Justice, Tal-
fourd, then leader of the Oxford Circuit ; the
28
Serjeant Talfourd
friend, executor, and biographer of Charles Lamb
— the only instance I can think of in anything like
modern times of the alliance of legal and literary
reputation without injury to either. Clients
are naturally mistrustful of counsel who have
other mistresses than their profession ; but
probably Talfourd never missed a brief by
reason of his notorious addiction to the tragic
muse. I do not think I had ever heard of
Lamb. But I had read " Ion," " The Athenian
Captive," and " Glencoe " — and here, before me
on the hearthrug, was the man who had written
them. The successful performance, or rather
the performance at all, of these graceful declama-
tions in blank verse is inconceivable in these
days ; but it was both possible and actual in
those of Macready. I think, by the way, that
"Glencoe" was in prose; but am not sure, as I
have never seen it since I saw its author. I
wonder if I am the sole surviving reader of the
tragedies of Thomas Noon Talfourd. I should
not be surprised if I were. Not for these will
he be remembered by others, but as the friend
of Lamb, for his parliamentary championship of
the rights of authors, and for his sudden death
on the bench at Stafford while, in the course of
his charge to the Grand Jury, pleading for a
closer sympathy between the rich and the poor.
29
Mid-Victorian Memories
My second author was of a very different
order. I am certainly not alone in aff*ectionate
memories of Edward Lear, When quite a young
man, living in London as young men without
means or any prospects better than Alnaschar's
do manage to live, he was introduced into my
mother's home circle by her brother Robert, then
studying art — my only near relation neither sailor
nor lawyer— under (I think) Hulmandel. He at
once became an ever welcome visitor : an almost
brotherly and sisterly relation grew up between
him and the group of bright young girls who then
filled with life the house in Queen Square. It
was on one of my visits there that I met him for
the first time. Marriages, two of them entailing
emigration to an island in then distant and remote
Ontario, had thinned the group by that time, and
the years had not passed over those who were
left without a sign. But such changes as these
were not of the sort that affected Lear. One has
heard a great deal of late about " genius for
friendship." The rather worn-out phrase might
well have been invented, in its original freshness,
for him. Of his ever-increasing multitude of
friends I do not believe that he ever lost one
except by death ; a new friendship never lessened
an old one ; and it is impossible to imagine his
having ever made an enemy. His corre-
30
Edward Lear
spondence came to be immense — he had at last
to settle a scheme for its restriction, lest it should
absorb the whole of his time. Whether he kept
to such a scheme is more than doubtful. How-
ever that may be, he never ceased to write at
frequent intervals to my mother so long as both
were alive — long and intimate letters, free from
the by no means brilliant jocularity of comic
spelling which makes his published letters to
Chichester Fortescue such wearisome reading.
Only an occasional grotesquely coined poly-
syllable gave the Learian cachet to really amusing
and interesting accounts of what he was doing
or planning. They were a pleasure to us all.
Alas, that such would-have-been valuable con-
tributions to my reminiscences should have dis-
appeared — I cannot think inadvertently, much
less intentionally, destroyed.
Lear's love of children, and his immediate
attraction for them, was of the essence of his
charm. That first meeting of mine with him is
memorable inasmuch as, while talking to my
aunts, he amused himself for my benefit by
making a pen-and-ink drawing of an Eastern
landscape, with camels and palms. I did not
listen to the talk : I was wholly absorbed in
following the strokes of the pen. I treasured it
as long as the wear and tear of nurseries and
31
Mid- Victorian Memories
schoolrooms allowed. Much more interesting,
however — indeed they may take rank as pieces of
Hterafy history — were Lear's occasional visits to
us at Cheltenham ; for we children, my brother,
my sister, and myself, were delighted eye-
witnesses of the production of some of the earliest
pages of the first "Book of Nonsense;" both
pictures (so to call them) and rhymes. The
current tradition is that these were dashed off for
the children of the fourteenth Earl of Derby.
No doubt many of them were, for Lear numbered
at least three successive earls among his patrons
— which in his case invariably meant his attached
friends ; and his first commission, as an animal
painter, had come from Knowsley. But equally
without doubt many other children had their part
in the fun ; and I can answer for the very con-
siderable part accorded to us three. We possessed
a good share of the original drawings, made
while we stood by the artist's knee, and their
attendant "Limericks" were household words,
long before there was any thought of their collec-
tion and publication. Alas, again ! When the
general collection came to be made, our particular
one was added to it, and, translated into print,
was no longer our very own, that we had watched
flow for us from the pen. Apropos of the
connection of the House of Stanley with the
32
Origin of '' Book of Nonsense "
** Book of Nonsense," Lear used to tell how, soon
after its publication, he was travelling in a railway-
carriage opposite a family party engaged in
enjoying its fun. The father proceeded to
explain to the children that its actual author was
the Earl of Derby himself, under the pen-name
of Edward Lear : a very slight disguise of
"Edward, Earl," "Lear" being of course an
obvious anagram of " Earl." The veritable
author's assurance that not only was Edward
Lear the real name of a real person, but that he
himself knew him well, had no effect beyond pro-
voking a little temper. " I have it on the very
best authority," was the unanswerable retort to
all he could say. Even when he produced a
visiting card, and declared himself to be the man, it
was evidently to be regarded as either a lunatic or
an impostor. Considering the popular preference
of fable, the wilder the better, to fact, it is really
surprising that so first-class a myth as the identity
of the Rupert of Debate with Derry-down-Derry
should have failed to fix itself ineradicably in the
public mind.
Lear's friendship was an inheritance from
generation to generation ; and after I came to
London in 1863, never again to leave it, I seldom
missed seeing him on any of his visits there. It
was on his last visit that I saw him for the last
D 33
Mid- Victorian Memories
time. My mature impression of him is that he
was, in spite of any superficial evidence to the
contrary, a melancholy man, weighed down by
a sense of solitude. His innumerable friendships
were, I think, too much in the nature of a crowd :
and there is no such loneliness as is to be found
in a crowd. His gentle and affectionate nature
needed marriage, especially if it should give him
children of his own instead of all the world's.
But to this there was the oddest of all odd
obstacles. He had an ingrained conviction that
he was too ugly for any woman to accept him.
No doubt he was ugly. His impressionistic
self-portraiture on the first page of the " Book of
Nonsense" as the " Old Derry-down-Derry, Who
loved to see little folks merry," is scarcely a
caricature : and his plainness of face was made
the more emphatic by his nearness of sight,
awkward slouch, and a style of dress which can
only be called careless by courtesy. He may
have thought that dress was no concern of one
for whom it could do nothing. But though,
as a true humorist, he could make himself his