Collections and Recollections

Part 1

COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS

George William Erskine Russell

THE MOST GENIAL OF COMPANIONS

JAMES PAYN

AT WHOSE SUGGESTION THESE PAPERS WERE WRITTEN AND TO WHOM THEY WERE INSCRIBED

DIED MARCH 25, 1898

* * * * *

Is he gone to a land of no laughter-- This man that made mirth for us all? Proves Death but a silence hereafter, Where the echoes of earth cannot fall? Once closed, have the lips no more duty? No more pleasure the exquisite ears? Has the heart done o'erflowing with beauty, As the eyes have with tears?

Nay, if aught be sure, what can be surer Than that earth's good decays not with earth? And of all the heart's springs none are purer Than the springs of the fountains of mirth? He that sounds them has pierced the heart's hollows, The places where tears are and sleep; For the foam-flakes that dance in life's shallows Are wrung from life's deep.

J. RHOADES

PREFACE.

It has been suggested by Mr. Reginald Smith, to whose friendliness and skill the fortunes of this book have been so greatly indebted, that a rather fuller preface might be suitably prefixed to this Edition.

When the book first appeared, it was stated on the title-page to be written "by One who has kept a Diary." My claim to that modest title will scarcely be challenged by even the most carping critic who is conversant with the facts. On August 13, 1865, being then twelve years old, I began my Diary. Several attempts at diary-keeping I had already made and abandoned. This more serious endeavour was due to the fact that a young lady gave me a manuscript-book attractively bound in scarlet leather; and such a gift inspired a resolution to live up to it. Shall I be deemed to lift the veil of private life too roughly if I transcribe some early entries? "23rd: Dear Kate came; very nice." "25th: Kate is very delightful." "26th: Kate is a darling girl. She kissed me."

Before long, Love's young dream was dispersed by the realities of Harrow; but the scarlet book continued to receive my daily confidences. Soon--alas for puerile fickleness!--the name of "Kate" disappears, and is replaced by rougher appellations, such as "Bob" and "Charlie;" "Carrots" this, and "Chaw" that. To Harrow succeeds Oxford, and now more recognizable names begin to appear--"Liddon" and "Holland," "Gore" and "Milner", and "Lymington."

But through all these personal permutations the continuous Life of the Diary remained unbroken, and so remains even to the present date. Not a day is missing. When I have been laid low by any of the rather numerous ills to which, if to little else, my flesh has been heir, I have always been able to jot down such pregnant entries as "Temperature 102°;" "Salicine;" "Boiled Chicken;" "Bath Chair." It is many a year since the scarlet book was laid aside; but it has had a long line of successors; and together they contain the record of what I have been, done, seen, and heard during thirty-eight years of chequered existence. Entertaining a strong and well-founded suspicion that Posterity would burn these precious volumes unread, I was moved, some few years ago, to compress into small compass the little that seemed worth remembering. At that time my friend Mr. James Payn was already confined to the house by the beginnings of what proved to be his last illness. His host of friends did what they could to relieve the tedium of his suffering days; and the only contribution which I could make was to tell him at my weekly visits anything interesting or amusing which I collected from the reperusal of my diary. Greatly to my surprise, he urged me to make these "Collections" into a book, and to add to them whatever "Recollections" they might suggest. Acting on this advice, I published during the year 1897 a series of weekly papers in the Manchester Guardian. They were received more kindly than I had any right to expect; and early in 1898 I reproduced them in the present volume--just too late to offer it, except in memory, to dear James Payn.

The fortunes of the book, from that time till now, would not interest the public, but are extremely interesting to me. The book brought me many friends. One story, at any rate, elicited the gracious laughter of Queen Victoria. A pauper who had known better days wrote to thank me for enlivening the monotony of a workhouse infirmary. Literary clerks plied me with questions about the sources of my quotations. A Scotch doctor demurred to the prayer--"Water that spark"--on the ground that the water would put the spark out. Elderly clergymen in country parsonages revived the rollicking memories of their undergraduate days, and sent me academic quips of the forties and fifties. From the most various quarters I received suggestions, corrections, and enrichments which have made each edition an improvement on the last. The public notices were, on the whole, extremely kind, and some were unintentionally amusing. Thus one editor, putting two and two together, calculated that the writer could not be less than eighty years old; while another, like Mrs. Prig, "didn't believe there was no sich a person," and acutely divined that the book was a journalistic squib directed against my amiable garrulity. The most pleasing notice was that of Jean La Frette, some extracts from which I venture to append. It is true that competent judges have questioned the accuracy of M. La Frette's idiom, but his sentiments are unimpeachable. The necessary corrective was not wanting, for a weekly journal of high culture described my poor handiwork as "Snobbery and Snippets." There was a boisterousness--almost a brutality--about the phrase which deterred me from reading the review; but I am fain to admit that there was a certain rude justice in the implied criticism.

G.W.E.R.

Christmas, 1903.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. LINKS WITH THE PAST

II. LORD RUSSELL

III. LORD SHAFTESBURY

IV. CARDINAL MANNING

V. LORD HOUGHTON

VI. RELIGION AND MORALITY

VII. SOCIAL EQUALIZATION

VIII. SOCIAL AMELIORATION

Part 2

IX. THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE

X. POLITICS

XI. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY

XII. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY (contd.)

XIII. CONVERSATION

XIV. CONVERSATION (continued)

XV. CONVERSATION (continued)

XVI. CONVERSATION (continued)

XVII. CLERGYMEN

XVIII. CLERGYMEN (continued)

XIX. REPARTEE

XX. TITLES

XXI. THE QUEEN'S ACCESSION

XXII. "PRINCEDOMS, VIRTUES, POWERS"

XXIII. LORD BEACONSFIELD

XXIV. FLATTERERS AND BORES

XXV. ADVERTISEMENTS

XXVI. PARODIES IN PROSE

XXVII. PARODIES IN VERSE

XXVIII. PARODIES IN VERSE (continued)

XXIX. VERBAL INFELICITIES

XXX. THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS

XXXI. CHILDREN

XXXII. LETTER-WRITING

XXXIII. OFFICIALDOM

XXXIV. AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK

INDEX.

LINKS WITH THE PAST.

Part 3

Of the celebrated Mrs. Disraeli her husband is reported to have said, "She is an excellent creature, but she never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans." In my walk through life I have constantly found myself among excellent creatures of this sort. The world is full of vague people, and in the average man, and still more in the average woman, the chronological sense seems to be entirely wanting. Thus, when I have occasionally stated in a mixed company that my first distinct recollection was the burning of Covent Garden Theatre, I have seen a general expression of surprised interest, and have been told, in a tone meant to be kind and complimentary, that my hearers would hardly have thought that my memory went back so far. The explanation has been that these excellent creatures had some vague notions of Rejected Addresses floating in their minds, and confounded the burning of Covent Garden Theatre in 1856 with that of Drury Lane Theatre in 1809. It was pleasant to feel that one bore one's years so well as to make the error possible.

But events, however striking, are only landmarks in memory. They are isolated and detached, and begin and end in themselves. The real interest of one's early life is in its Links with the Past, through the old people whom one has known. Though I place my first distinct recollection in 1856, I have memories more or less hazy of an earlier date.

There was an old Lady Robert Seymour, who lived in Portland Place, and died there in 1855, in her ninety-first year. Probably she is my most direct link with the past, for she carried down to the time of the Crimean War the habits and phraseology of Queen Charlotte's early Court. "Goold" of course she said for gold, and "yaller" for yellow, and "laylock" for lilac. She laid the stress on the second syllable of "balcony." She called her maid her "'ooman;" instead of sleeping at a place, she "lay" there, and when she consulted the doctor she spoke of having "used the 'potticary."

There still lives, in full possession of all her faculties, a venerable lady who can say that her husband was born at Boston when America was a British dependency. This is the widow of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, who was born in 1772, and helped to defeat Mr. Gladstone's Paper Bill in the House of Lords on his eighty-eighth birthday. He died in 1862.

Continue reading Collections and Recollections free in the Wunder reader →