We know more of the early days of the Pyramids or of ancient Babylon than we do of our own. The Stone age, the dragons of the prime, are not more remote from us than is our earliest childhood. It is not so long ago for any of us; and yet, our memories of it are but veiled spectres wandering in the mazes of some foregone existence.

Are we really trailing clouds of glory from afar? Or are our ‘forgettings’ of the outer Eden only? Or, setting poetry aside, are they perhaps the quickening germs of all past heredity—an epitome of our race and its descent? At any rate then, if ever, our lives are such stuff as dreams are made of. There is no connected story of events, thoughts, acts, or feelings. We try in vain to re-collect; but the secrets of the grave are not more inviolable,—for the beginnings, like the endings, of life are lost in darkness.

It is very difficult to affix a date to any relic of that dim past. We may have a distinct remembrance of some pleasure, some pain, some fright, some accident, but the vivid does not help us to chronicle with accuracy. A year or two makes a vast difference in our ability. We can remember well enough when we donned the ‘cauda virilis,’ but not when we left off petticoats.

The first remembrance to which I can correctly tack a date is the death of George IV. I was between three and four years old. My recollection of the fact is perfectly distinct—distinct by its association with other facts, then far more weighty to me than the death of a king.

I was watching with rapture, for the first time, the spinning of a peg-top by one of the grooms in the stable yard, when the coachman, who had just driven my mother home, announced the historic news. In a few minutes four or five servants—maids and men—came running to the stables to learn particulars, and the peg-top, to my sorrow, had to be abandoned for gossip and flirtation. We were a long way from street criers—indeed, quite out of town. My father’s house was in Kensington, a little further west than the present museum. It was completely surrounded by fields and hedges. I mention the fact merely to show to what age definite memory can be authentically assigned. Doubtless we have much earlier remembrances, though we must reckon these by days, or by months at the outside. The relativity of the reckoning would seem to make Time indeed a ‘Form of Thought.’

Two or three reminiscences of my childhood have stuck to me; some of them on account of their comicality. I was taken to a children’s ball at St. James’s Palace. In my mind’s eye I have but one distinct vision of it. I cannot see the crowd—there was nothing to distinguish that from what I have so often seen since; nor the court dresses, nor the soldiers even, who always attract a child’s attention in the streets; but I see a raised dais on which were two thrones. William IV. sat on one, Queen Adelaide on the other. I cannot say whether we were marched past in turn, or how I came there. But I remember the look of the king in his naval uniform. I remember his white kerseymere breeches, and pink silk stockings, and buckled shoes. He took me between his knees, and asked, ‘Well, what are you going to be, my little man?’

‘A sailor,’ said I, with brazen simplicity.

‘Going to avenge the death of Nelson—eh? Fond o’ sugar-plums?’

‘Ye-es,’ said I, taking a mental inventory of stars and anchor buttons.

Upon this, he fetched from the depths of his waistcoat pocket a capacious gold box, and opened it with a tap, as though he were about to offer me a pinch of snuff. ‘There’s for you,’ said he.

I helped myself, unawed by the situation, and with my small fist clutching the bonbons, was passed on to Queen Adelaide. She gave me a kiss, for form’s sake, I thought; and I scuttled back to my mother.

But here followed the shocking part of the enfant terrible’s adventure. Not quite sure of Her Majesty’s identity—I had never heard there was a Queen—I naÏvely asked my mother, in a very audible stage-whisper, ‘Who is the old lady with—?’ My mother dragged me off the instant she had made her curtsey. She had a quick sense of humour; and, judging from her laughter, when she told her story to another lady in the supper room, I fancied I had said or done something very funny. I was rather disconcerted at being seriously admonished, and told I must never again comment upon the breath of ladies who condescended to kiss, or to speak to, me.

While we lived at Kensington, Lord Anglesey used often to pay my mother a visit. She had told me the story of the battle of Waterloo, in which my Uncle George—6th Lord Albemarle—had taken part; and related how Lord Anglesey had lost a leg there, and how one of his legs was made of cork. Lord Anglesey was a great dandy. The cut of the Paget hat was an heirloom for the next generation or two, and the gallant Marquis’ boots and tightly-strapped trousers were patterns of polish and precision. The limp was perceptible; but of which leg, was, in spite of careful investigation, beyond my diagnosis. His presence provoked my curiosity, till one fine day it became too strong for resistance. While he was busily engaged in conversation with my mother, I, watching for the chance, sidled up to his chair, and as soon as he looked away, rammed my heel on to his toes. They were his toes. And considering the jump and the oath which instantly responded to my test, I am persuaded they were abnormally tender ones. They might have been made of corns, certainly not of cork.

Another discovery I made about this period was, for me at least, a ‘record’: it happened at Quidenham—my grandfather the 4th Lord Albemarle’s place.

Some excursion was afoot, which needed an early breakfast. When this was half over, one married couple were missing. My grandfather called me to him (I was playing with another small boy in one of the window bays). ‘Go and tell Lady Maria, with my love,’ said he, ‘that we shall start in half an hour. Stop, stop a minute. Be sure you knock at the door.’ I obeyed orders—I knocked at the door, but failed to wait for an answer. I entered without it. And what did I behold? Lady Maria was still in bed; and by the side of Lady M. was, very naturally, Lady M.’s husband, also in bed and fast asleep. At first I could hardly believe my senses. It was within the range of my experience that boys of my age occasionally slept in the same bed. But that a grown up man should sleep in the same bed with his wife was quite beyond my notion of the fitness of things. I was so staggered, so long in taking in this astounding novelty, that I could not at first deliver my grandfathers message. The moment I had done so, I rushed back to the breakfast room, and in a loud voice proclaimed to the company what I had seen. My tale produced all the effect I had anticipated, but mainly in the shape of amusement. One wag—my uncle Henry Keppel—asked for details, gravely declaring he could hardly credit my statement. Every one, however, seemed convinced by the circumstantial nature of my evidence when I positively asserted that their heads were not even at opposite ends of the bed, but side by side upon the same pillow.

A still greater soldier than Lord Anglesey used to come to Holkham every year, a great favourite of my father’s; this was Lord Lynedoch. My earliest recollections of him owe their vividness to three accidents—in the logical sense of the term: his silky milk-white locks, his Spanish servant who wore earrings—and whom, by the way, I used to confound with Courvoisier, often there at the same time with his master Lord William Russell, for the murder of whom he was hanged, as all the world knows—and his fox terrier Nettle, which, as a special favour, I was allowed to feed with Abernethy biscuits.

He was at Longford, my present home, on a visit to my father in 1835, when, one evening after dinner, the two old gentlemen—no one else being present but myself—sitting in armchairs over the fire, finishing their bottle of port, Lord Lynedoch told the wonderful story of his adventures during the siege of Mantua by the French, in 1796. For brevity’s sake, it were better perhaps to give the outline in the words of Alison. ‘It was high time the Imperialists should advance to the relief of this fortress, which was now reduced to the last extremity from want of provisions. At a council of war held in the end of December, it was decided that it was indispensable that instant intelligence should be sent to Alvinzi of their desperate situation. An English officer, attached to the garrison, volunteered to perform the perilous mission, which he executed with equal courage and success. He set out, disguised as a peasant, from Mantua on December 29, at nightfall in the midst of a deep fall of snow, eluded the vigilance of the French patrols, and, after surmounting a thousand hardships and dangers, arrived at the headquarters of Alvinzi, at Bassano, on January 4, the day after the conferences at Vicenza were broken up.

‘Great destinies awaited this enterprising officer. He was Colonel Graham, afterwards victor at Barrosa, and the first British general who planted the English standard on the soil of France.’

This bare skeleton of the event was endued ‘with sense and soul’ by the narrator. The ‘hardships and dangers’ thrilled one’s young nerves. Their two salient features were ice perils, and the no less imminent one of being captured and shot as a spy. The crossing of the rivers stands out prominently in my recollection. All the bridges were of course guarded, and he had two at least within the enemy’s lines to get over—those of the Mincio and of the Adige. Probably the lagunes surrounding the invested fortress would be his worst difficulty. The Adige he described as beset with a two-fold risk—the avoidance of the bridges, which courted suspicion, and the thin ice and only partially frozen river, which had to be traversed in the dark. The vigour, the zest with which the wiry veteran ‘shoulder’d his crutch and show’d how fields were won’ was not a thing to be forgotten.

Lord Lynedoch lived to a great age, and it was from his house at Cardington, in Bedfordshire, that my brother Leicester married his first wife, Miss Whitbread, in 1843. That was the last time I saw him.

Perhaps the following is not out of place here, although it is connected with more serious thoughts:

Though neither my father nor my mother were more pious than their neighbours, we children were brought up religiously. From infancy we were taught to repeat night and morning the Lord’s Prayer, and invoke blessings on our parents. It was instilled into us by constant repetition that God did not love naughty children—our naughtiness being for the most part the original sin of disobedience, rooted in the love of forbidden fruit in all its forms of allurement. Moses himself could not have believed more faithfully in the direct and immediate intervention of an avenging God. The pain in one’s stomach incident to unripe gooseberries, no less than the consequent black dose, or the personal chastisement of a responsible and apprehensive nurse, were but the just visitations of an offended Deity.

Whether my religious proclivities were more pronounced than those of other children I cannot say, but certainly, as a child, I was in the habit of appealing to Omnipotence to gratify every ardent desire.

There were peacocks in the pleasure grounds at Holkham, and I had an Æsthetic love for their gorgeous plumes. As I hunted under and amongst the shrubs, I secretly prayed that my search might be rewarded. Nor had I a doubt, when successful, that my prayer had been granted by a beneficent Providence.

Let no one smile at this infantine credulity, for is it not the basis of that religious trust which helps so many of us to support the sorrows to which our stoicism is unequal? Who that might be tempted thoughtlessly to laugh at the child does not sometimes sustain the hope of finding his ‘plumes’ by appeals akin to those of his childhood? Which of us could not quote a hundred instances of such a soothing delusion—if delusion it be? I speak not of saints, but of sinners: of the countless hosts who aspire to this world’s happiness; of the dying who would live, of the suffering who would die, of the poor who would be rich, of the aggrieved who seek vengeance, of the ugly who would be beautiful, of the old who would appear young, of the guilty who would not be found out, and of the lover who would possess. Ah! the lover. Here possibility is a negligible element. Consequences are of no consequence. Passion must be served. When could a miracle be more pertinent?

It is just fifty years ago now; it was during the Indian Mutiny. A lady friend of mine did me the honour to make me her confidant. She paid the same compliment to many—most of her friends; and the friends (as is their wont) confided in one another. Poor thing! her case was a sad one. Whose case is not? She was, by her own account, in the forty-second year of her virginity; and it may be added, parenthetically, an honest fourteen stone in weight.

She was in love with a hero of Lucknow. It cannot be said that she knew him only by his well-earned fame. She had seen him, had even sat by him at dinner. He was young, he was handsome. It was love at sight, accentuated by much meditation—‘obsessions [peradventure] des images gÉnÉtiques.’ She told me (and her other confidants, of course) that she prayed day and night that this distinguished officer, this handsome officer, might return her passion. And her letters to me (and to other confidants) invariably ended with the entreaty that I (and her other, &c.) would offer up a similar prayer on her behalf. Alas! poor soul, poor body! I should say, the distinguished officer, together with the invoked Providence, remained equally insensible to her supplications. The lady rests in peace. The soldier, though a veteran, still exults in war.

But why do I cite this single instance? Are there not millions of such entreaties addressed to Heaven on this, and on every day? What difference is there, in spirit, between them and the child’s prayer for his feather? Is there anything great or small in the eye of Omniscience? Or is it not our thinking only that makes it so?