office that he was present at a banquet given by
the Master and Fellows to members and former
members of the college who had graduated
previously to a certain year. He spoke — in-
effectively, it seemed to me — but he had no
cause to complain of his speech's reception or
of his own. I sat next a County Court Judge
who had been of his year, had kept up an
intimacy with him ever since, and was convinced,
beyond the possibility of a doubt, that he had
been the victim of an atrocious conspiracy. I
have no opinion on the matter. My only know-
ledge of the Crawford and Dilke case is derived
from newspapers ; and opinions based upon con-
densed reports, however ably done, of trials
at which one has not been present, are of course
worth less than nothing. Worth a great deal,
however, are the opinions formed of a man by
91
Mid- Victorian Memories
his contemporaries as to what he will be and do,
not be and not do, at the age when character is
the most plainly legible. Dilke had the loyal
belief of the men who, themselves of the highest
sense of honour, had known him best and
longest, as well as of the lady whom he
married.
My most intimate college friend and daily
companion was Walter Scott Coward, afterwards
one of the ablest of H.M. Inspectors of Schools.
Nor did our intimacy cease with our comradeship
at Cambridge ; for, though our subsequent inter-
course was subject to long dormant periods, as
must needs be the case when the lines of life
diverge, it remained substantially the same for
nearly fifty years. We were recalling our old
times together only a few weeks before he died,
and so left me without the last unbroken link
between me and them. On leaving Cambridge
he had for some time been tutor to the eleven-
year-old son of Lord Blantyre, vi^ho had married
a sister of the Duke of Sutherland and was
consequently brother-in-law to the Duchess —
pre-eminently the Duchess, Queen Victoria's most
memorable Mistress of the Robes. One morning
master and pupil were relieving the monotony of
lessons in too noisy fashion to be aware, till too
late, of the entrance of the Duchess upon the
92
Charles Kingsley
scene. " Mr. Coward," said her Grace, " I
believe that you were engaged to teach Greek :
not how to jump over chairs." He described the
majesty of her rebuke, all the more awful for its
calm, as making him wish that, instead of teach-
ing the art of jumping over chairs, he had learned
that of vanishing under them.
During my first year, Charles Kingsley was
appointed Professor of Modern History. The
choice of so imaginative a historian, however
brilliant and popular, for the chair, was not gener-
ally regarded as happy, especially as it was more
than suspected of being due to Court favour.
Cambridge, though she has bred so many poets,
from Chaucer to Tennyson, is nothing if not
prosaically and mathematically accurate where
accuracy is required. None the less, his inaugural
lecture in the Senate House was delivered before
an overflowing audience eager or curious to see
and hear the man whose influence had been a
very actual and active part of history indeed. As
the address, however, proceeded, the air unmis-
takably froze. His argument was, in effect, that
while human history is, in the main, a chain of the
inevitable consequences from more or less ascer-
tainable causes, yet that this general law fails to
act when some strong man comes to break the
chain. History, therefore, while to some extent
93
Mid-Victorian Memories
a science, is to a very much greater made up of
the lives of great men, as being a law to them-
selves. He may have been partially right : such-
like theories usually are. But he was sadly
unlucky in the comparison of his law of history
to the law of gravitation, which he declared to
be "suspended" when a ball is prevented from
falling to the ground by the interference of a
man's palm — as if it were not an unalterable law
of gravitation that enables the palm to interfere :
as if, had Newton caught the legendary apple in
his hat, the law of gravitation would have ceased
for one instant to act and be. I was not the only
auditor who, at this point of the address, noticed
Whewell's rugged features relax into a grim smile.
How far Kingsley fulfilled the promise of his
peroration to devote the rest of his life to the
teaching of history, and, if so, how numerously
or otherwise his lessons were attended, I never
knew.
As among the survivors of the some sixteen
hundred undergraduates who could claim to be
fellow-students of Edward VH., I wish it were in
my power, for my readers' sake, to provide them
with a good dish of fresh gossip about the then
Prince of Wales. I have not a morsel ; and I
much doubt if anybody has more — any, that is to
say, worth cooking. Everybody knows how and
94
A Royal Undergraduate
under what watchful guardianship he lived at
Madingley — which is not Cambridge : how speci-
ally he was lectured : and how the real life of the
place was represented for him by a few acquaint-
ances of his own college, Trinity, not chosen by
himself, but carefully selected. Among these I
can recall two — the Duke of St. Albans, because
his nobleman's ijold tassel and of"own to match
were seen about a good deal : and a nephew of
the Master of Trinity (Whewell at that date),
because he was my own schoolfellow Frederic
Myers. But he cannot help me in this matter
because, first, I cannot imagine him as capable
of gossip ; secondly, because, if such a thing
were imaginable, our sets, and I may say our-
selves, were so far apart that our intercourse was
not long in dwindling down to virtually none.
They could hardly, however, differ more than
the outward and visible Cambridge of these days
differs from the Cambridge of those. The dingy
debating room of the Union had to be looked tor,
and perhaps found, in a sort of mews. What is
now the principal residential quarter was then a
tract of open fields, dividing the quite distant and
isolated railway station from the town. The
colleges, in their architecture and arrangements,
were still as they had ever been within the
memory of their oldest members. There was no
95
Mid- Victorian Memories
Girton or Newnham : the female student was
absolutely unknown. The married Don had
just become possible, but had not yet begun to
be actual. Of course there were some Heads
of Houses, Professors, Lecturers, Officials,
" Coaches," and others of classes not hitherto
bound to celibacy who had wives, and, presum-
ably, some of these had daughters ; but their
womankind was so little in evidence as to be
practically non-existent. It was quite feasible for
a man to live the whole life of Cambridg^e without
becoming personally aware of the existence of
any sex but his own — out, that is to say, of the
May term : and then the merely temporary in-
vaders represented all that the life of Cambridge
was not, before the whole spirit of the place had
been subjugated by academic Eve. As the op-
posite of a misogynist, I will take for granted
that the new life is better than the old. But to
those of us who lived the old purely masculine
life, what is called " Cambridge " is not Cam-
bridge, but a brand new University under a
delusive sameness of name.
Every story must needs be new to somebody.
So for the benefit of such somebodies I will recall
one lady of my own time who was not a nobody,
inasmuch as she was conspicuously handsome.
She was the wife of the unromantically named
96
Beauty and the Beast
editor of Euclid, Potts : and he was, beyond any
comparison, the very ugliest man I ever saw.
" I can't understand," said he, " why we should
be known as Beauty and the Beast. I have
always considered Mrs. Potts to be distinctly
good-looking." The story merits remembrance
as an instance of that rarest of rarities — wit
without a sting.
H 97
CHAPTER VIII
In Hall and Chambers— The Berryer banquet: Brougham
and Cockburn — Gray's Inn — Rushton v. Campbell — An
inefficient volunteer — Evenings in Mitre Court — " Atalanta
in Calydon " — " Agag " Stott — Faiiatici per la musica
Having secured an unshared first class in the
Law Tripos, and consequent election to one of
the three Law Studentships already mentioned
among the legal specialities of Trinity Hall, I
beean life in London as one of the three or four
pupils of Charles Pollock, a son of the then Lord
Chief Baron, and himself afterwards a Baron of
the Court over which his father had presided.
The son used to complain of the difficulty of
keeping up an acquaintance with a father who
invariably rose before five in the morning, and,
after a day of judicial duties, was in bed by nine.
Those were the days of special pleading ; and
Charles Pollock's sound and solid practice neces-
sarily included the science said to have required
for its assimilation an insatiable appetite for saw-
dust sandwiches without butter. While lodging
in the still untransformed Bloomsbury of earlier
memories, and attending his chambers in Child's
98
In Hall and Chambers
Place, a long-demolished cul de sac adjoining
Middle Temple Lane, I completed my course of
dinners at Gray's Inn. There was as yet no
compulsory examination of candidates for the
Bar, a year's formal attendance at two courses
of lectures — attendance by no means necessarily
implying attention — being accepted as an alterna-
tive ; and this, as the line of least resistance, I
elected to follow. But the eating of so many
dinners in Hall was, of course, as essential a
preparation for the right to wear a two-tailed
wig then as now. The procedure was only more
reminiscent of a barbarous age ; for the dinner
hour was still five, and port was the only
beverage throughout the meal. In all serious-
ness, however, the only excuse for a scoff at the
notion of eating oneself into a profession is its
tempting ease. Nothing is more important than
the cultivation of a common professional atmo-
sphere. And I suppose no true Englishman will
deny that this is better achieved in the free and
friendly friction of the dinner-table than is any-
wise possible in the lecture room or examination
hall.
It seems rather a leap ; but the mention of
dinners in general leads to that of a very big one
in particular, as belonging to my student period —
the banquet given by the English Bar to the
99
Mid-Victorian Memories
great French advocate Berryer. Students as
well as barristers were admitted among the hosts
of the occasion : and my presence enables me to
give the exact words of a seldom accurately
quoted passage in the speech of Sir Alexander
Cockburn. Lord Brougham had declared the
whole duty of an advocate to be to his client
only, without recognition of any other, public or
private ; to fight with all his might for his client's
victory, and for that alone, regardless of however
injurious, however unjust, to the rights, interests,
and reputations of others the consequences of
the battle might be. I am not presenting his
contention a whit too strongly ; for that matter,
Brougham's view of the ethics of advocacy is
pretty generally known. And the battle was to
be conducted, he proclaimed, " Per fas aut per
nefas " — by any means, fair or foul. " Yes,"
retorted Cockburn, who followed, " Per fas sed
non per nefas ; with the sword of the soldier — not
with the dagger of the assassin." I can hear the
words now, in the very voice that sent them ring-
ing down the hall. And I am glad to remember
the applause with which they were acclaimed.
Gray's Inn was then a very small Society ; but
it was thus the more sociable. Our resemblance
to a family party, wherein everybody knows
everybody, was certainly not the less complete
100
Gray's Inn
for a certain, or rather uncertain, propensity to
quarrels. Why we quarrelled, or what about, I
was never able to tell ; and I am sure that my
inability was generally shared, especially by the
parties to the squabbles. Did the propensity
come from drinking port through dinner, and
frequently after dinner too ? Or from our large
proportion of Irish students in comparison with
Lincoln's Inn or the two Temples? We were
not behindhand even with these orreat Societies
o
in the matter of our traditions. Was not Bacon
of us — did he not habitually walk in the garden
overlooked by his chambers ? Did not Shake-
speare — ominous conjunction of names ! — produce
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," its first per-
formance, in our Hall ? So we piously believed.
Were not the tables at which we dined made
from the timber of the Great Armada ; and was
not " The glorious memory of good Queen Bess,"
their donor and our constant benefactress, solemnly
and ritually honoured as the only toast of grand
day? Did not our roll of worthies comprise
Chief Justice Gascoigne, Stephen Gardiner, Philip
Sidney, Lord Burleigh, the three Archbishops,
Whitgift, Laud, and Juxon, Chief Justice Holt,
Samuel Romilly — whose name, by the way, was
represented still, both among the benchers and
the students. Among the Masters of the Bench
lOI
Mid- Victorian Memories
were the two future judges, Huddlestone and
Manisty. The incisive voice of the former
started talking with the "Amen" of the grace
before meat, and sounded over the hall without
a moment's cessation till he retired with his
fellow-benchers into the Parliament Room, where,
I doubt not, it started again. To get in a
mouthful edgeways must have been a feat re-
quiring no little skill.
Among the students of my time, none will
fail to remember the almost painfully spare
figure of William Lowes Rushton, the Shake-
spearean enthusiast who claimed to have antici-
pated Lord Campbell in demonstrating, from
the internal evidence of the plays, that their
author was a lawyer ; Campbell being an un-
scrupulous plagiarist of Rushton. There was no
suggestion of the Baconian heresy, which must
have been in its early infancy, if yet born ;
William Shakespeare the dramatist and William
Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were not
yet suspected of conspiracy to perpetrate the
silliest hoax on record. I think that Rushton
was entitled to claim against Campbell priority
of publication of their common argument, that
only a lawyer could have employed legal techni-
calities, frequently abstruse and unlikely to occur
to a layman, with the accurate familiarity dis-
102
Rushton V. Campbell
played in the Shakespearean plays. Plagiarism,
however, is another affair. It is quite on the
cards that Campbell had never seen or heard of
Rushton's articles on a probability likely to occur
to any legal mind. As to the probability itself,
a learned King's Counsel has gone far to de-
molish it by showing that while legal knowledge
is conspicuous in the plays, equally conspicuous
in them is legal ignorance. The whole question
cannot matter much. The plays are still and
always the plays, even if more than a single hand
went to their making. And though it mattered
supremely to Rushton, even to the point of
rendering him a fanatic with a grievance, its im-
portance to him arose from a sincere and whole-
hearted enthusiasm for the plays themselves — a
whole-hearted sincerity by no means normally char-
acteristic of controversies concerning their author.
He knew them by heart — meaning all that " by
heart" can in its first and fullest sense imply.
Nor was his enthusiasm exclusive. It ex-
tended, by an obvious enough process, from
Shakespeare to music, and, perhaps yet more
obviously, to patriotic duty. Enthusiasm is not
necessarily contagious, but it is none the less
compulsive for that ; and, one day, a casual
meeting with Rushton in Lincoln's Inn ended
in his carrying me off to be forthwith enlisted
103
Mid-Victorian Memories
in the corps popularly known as the Devil's
Own. My reminiscences of that corps can be
recorded very concisely indeed. I certainly
attended, though with constantly lessening zeal,
a very few drills for raw recruits on the terrace
of Lincoln's Inn garden. The next step (to the
goose's) was to find the whole business a bore,
to be postponed to a next time that somehow
never came. I never procured a uniform or
handled a rifle ; and the next proceeding was
to forget that I was even so much as nominally
bound to qualify myself for effective service to
my Queen ::nd Country. Nor was it till years
later that I was disagreeably reminded of my
forgotten duty by the receipt of an application
for the payment of my subscriptions to the corps,
by that time fallen into formidably and — as is
invariably the way in such cases — inconveniently
long arrear. I paid : and I resigned. I am
certainly not going to make excuses for not
having done what I had voluntarily undertaken
to do. But I do think it would have been better
for myself, morally as well as physically, if I had
been obliged to make myself effective under
some stringent system. And, not being an
exceptional person in any way, I may safely
take it that what would have been better for
me would, in the same way, have been better
104
Friends at Grav's Inn
for some thousands more whose momentary
flicker of miHtary spirit was too faint to grow,
without some fanning from without, into even the
feeblest flame ; and better, by those thousands,
for their native land. I do not suppose that
I should have made a notably efficient " terri-
torial " ; but, at the very least, we must all have
attained to some minimum of efficiency in any
such force had it existed for us — we, the absolutely
inefficient volunteers.
Chief among the friends for whom I had to
thank Gray's Inn was Ben Thomas Williams, a
Welshman from the Welsh part of Pembroke-
shire, in after years a Queen's Counsel and
County Court Judge. One of my first dinners
in hall during my first student's term was on
the occasion of his call ; I had then, though
still a painfully shy schoolboy very much at sea
among strange waters, somehow made his
acquaintance. No doubt the " somehow " was
his own kindly good nature. In him, on my
return to Gray's Inn hall, I found a ready-made
friend. But I must part from him for the
present, for his full and proper place in my
memory is in connection with later events — if
such a word may be introduced into such
uneventful remininiscences as these. Among
Trinity Hall men in London I found my
105
Mid- Victorian Memories
former opposite neighbour Alsager Hay-Hill,
who, together with a brother in the Audit Office,
occupied a set of chambers in Mitre Court,
adjoining the Temple. They were on the top-
most floor of a very tall building, inspiring a
visitor in wintry weather, at a moment when
the fire happened to be low, to complain, in
the words of Tennyson's CEnone, of
Height and cold, the splendour of the Hills.
But the cold was but an accident of the minute,
speedily remedied ; and the irremediable height —
I forget how many steps one had to climb — was
no " object," as an advertiser would say, to the
lungs and limbs of Hill's friends and acquaintance,
who seemed as numerous in London as they had
been in Cambridge. At any rate, whenever I
made the ascent of a Friday evening, when he
was always at home, his room was sure to be
full of men, some habihtds, some there for the
first time ; for next to an old friend he liked
a new one. In fact those Friday evenings in
Mitre Court became a social institution for the
indulgence of talk at ease and at large.
Literature and Art were our principal topics ;
and there was much to be said of both in the
first half of the 'sixties. Whistler, for instance,
was a chronic bone of contention ; and William
io6
Evenings in Mitre Court
Cosmo Monkhouse, the afterwards eminent art
critic, Hill's most intimate habitii^, was one of
the painter's vanguard — or forlorn hope, as many
of us would call it then. Monkhouse — by way
of parenthesis — was then chiefly known among
his circle not as the critic by nature, but as a
poet by industry, relieving his week-day labours
at the Board of Trade by devoting his Sunday
mornings to versification. The visible result
was a little volume which did not bring him
fame, but was as respectably "minor" as the
pleasure of production could make it, and more
than merely respectable here and there. I do
not think he would take my criticism amiss now
any more than he used to take it then. But the
great event of those years was of a nature that,
I venture to say, would be absolutely impossible
now ; nay, that I cannot hope to make a later
generation even dimly comprehend. It was
nothing less than an outburst of popular exulta-
tion, not over some sensational achievement in
sport or finance, but over a new poem by one whose
very name was unknown save to a small group
of Oxford men. Who was this Swinburne, whose
" Atalanta in Calydon " had, all of a sudden,
without previous puff or prestige, taken the
entire public by storm? The "Atalanta," and
its author, were the topic of the day, and of
107
Mid-Victorian Memories
many days. I am pretty sure that if a new
George Eliot were to publish a new " Adam
Bede " her novel might, if ably engineered, be
talked about for its nine days or so a little more
than its weekly swarm of rivals ; but throw a
whole nation into excitement — No. Yet not
even Sherlock Holmes got such a grip of the
public mind in 1892 as Adam Bede in 1859.
" Adam Bede," however, was, after all, a novel.
But for a poem ; a dramatic poem ; a dramatic
poem on a classical theme, and in classical form
to boot, with an unknown name on its title-page,
to win instantaneous fame — that is what is so
utterly incomprehensible now, but was a fact then.
I have seldom known the satisfaction of being one
of a majority. But there was no possible minority
even of a single voice, when one evening in
1864, still remembered as if it were yesterday,
I, with my brother, who then shared my lodgings,
and another habitud of Mitre Court, feasted
together on " Atalanta in Calydon."
Of this third at our feast I intend to make
mention at some length, not because I can expect
his name to excite the slightest preliminary in-
terest, but because these pages will be and remain
the sole record of one who was extraordinarily
interesting in himself, and should, and might,
have left no inconsiderable mark upon his time.
108
^'Agag" Stott
And, as nobody knew him so intimately as I,
it is the more pious a duty to attempt his rescue
from perpetual but unmerited oblivion. I have
previously expressed my belief that some fairy
godmother must have bestowed upon Alfred
Ainger a christening gift against which no hostile
influences, from within or without, should ever be
able to prevail ; a charm needing for its working
no effort of his own. On the like theory, George
Stott, of whom I now speak, was assuredly a pre-
eminently helpless victim of that more familiar
malignant fairy whose gift, according to the leg-
ends of her race, neutralises all her sisters' favours.
I never knew anything definite of his early life,
except that it had been passed in Bristol, and
that he had been received into the Catholic
Church at the age of sixteen. That was a mis-
fortune from every point of view ; for it was
clearly a case of those impulsive and immature
conversions that are more likely than not to be
followed by a reaction. Reaction did follow, and
that strongly. By the time that I first saw his
frail-looking figure, with the disproportionately
large head, the sombre complexion, the Oriental
cast of features, and the chest wholly covered
by a magnificent black beard, I doubt if he
retained a fragment of his temporary creed. At
the sarne time he us^d to bewilder plain minds
109
Mid- Victorian Memories
by his contention that though he, George Stott,
had outgrown faith, as logically untenable, the
universal dominance of the Church of Rome was
the imperative need of this hopelessly illogical
world. He would, in mixed company, when the
talk turned upon such matters, so champion
Loyola and the counter-Reformation as to render
himself liable, at the period of Newdegate and
Whalley, to the suspicion of being a Jesuit in
disguise. I think it rather pleased him to convey
such an impression, for he thoroughly enjoyed
mystifying those whom he regarded as Philistines.
(Is that mid-Victorian term of contempt, imported
from Germany, for persons on whom our own
lofty intelligence looks down as stupidly and
incurably narrow-minded, still in common use ?
It seems to have passed out of print long enough