In February of this year, 1852, Lord Palmerston, aided by an incongruous force of Peelites and Protectionists, turned Lord John Russell out of office on his Militia Bill. Lord Derby, with Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, came into power on a cry for Protection.

Not long after my return to England, I was packed off to canvas the borough of Cricklade. It was then a very extensive borough, including a large agricultural district, as well as Swindon, the headquarters of the Great Western Railway. For many years it had returned two Conservative members, Messrs. Nield and Goddard. It was looked upon as an impregnable Tory stronghold, and the fight was little better than a forlorn hope.

My headquarters were at Coleshill, Lord Radnor’s. The old lord had, in his Parliamentary days, been a Radical; hence, my advanced opinions found great favour in his eyes. My programme was—Free Trade, Vote by Ballot, and Disestablishment. Two of these have become common-places (one perhaps effete), and the third is nearer to accomplishment than it was then.

My first acquaintance with a constituency, amongst whom I worked enthusiastically for six weeks, was comic enough. My instructions were to go to Swindon; there an agent, whom I had never seen, would join me. A meeting of my supporters had been arranged by him, and I was to make my maiden speech in the market-place.

My address, it should be stated—ultra-Radical, of course—was mainly concocted for me by Mr. Cayley, an almost rabid Tory, and then member for the North Riding of Yorkshire, but an old Parliamentary hand; and, in consequence of my attachment to his son, at that time and until his death, like a father to me.

When the train stopped at Swindon, there was a crowd of passengers, but not a face that I knew; and it was not till all but one or two had left, that a business-looking man came up and asked if I were the candidate for Cricklade. He told me that a carriage was in attendance to take us up to the town; and that a procession, headed by a band, was ready to accompany us thither. The procession was formed mainly of the Great Western boiler-makers and artisans. Their enthusiasm seemed slightly disproportioned to the occasion; and the vigour of the brass, and especially of the big drum, so filled my head with visions of Mr. Pickwick and his friend the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, that by the time I reached the market-place, I had forgotten every syllable of the speech which I had carefully learnt by heart. Nor was it the band alone that upset me; going up the hill the carriage was all but capsized by the frightened horses and the breaking of the pole. The gallant boiler-makers, however, at once removed the horses, and dragged the carriage with cheers of defiance into the crowd awaiting us.

My agent had settled that I was to speak from a window of the hotel. The only available one was an upper window, the lower sash of which could not be persuaded to keep up without being held. The consequence was, just as I was getting over the embarrassment of extemporary oration, down came the sash and guillotined me. This put the crowd in the best of humours; they roared with laughter, and after that we got on capitally together.

A still more inopportune accident happened to me later in the day, when speaking at Shrivenham. A large yard enclosed by buildings was chosen for the meeting. The difficulty was to elevate the speaker above the heads of the assembly. In one corner of the yard was a water-butt. An ingenious elector got a board, placed it on the top of the butt—which was full of water—and persuaded me to make this my rostrum. Here, again, in the midst of my harangue—perhaps I stamped to emphasize my horror of small loaves and other Tory abominations—the board gave way; and I narrowly escaped a ducking by leaping into the arms of a ‘supporter.’

The end of it all was that my agent at the last moment threw up the sponge. The farmers formed a serried phalanx against Free Trade; it was useless to incur the expense of a poll. Then came the bill. It was a heavy one; for in addition to my London agent—a professional electioneering functionary—were the local agents at towns like Malmesbury, Wootton Bassett, Shrivenham, &c., &c. My eldest brother, who was a soberer-minded politician than I, although very liberal to me in other ways, declined to support my political opinions. I myself was quite unable to pay the costs. Knowing this, Lord Radnor called me into his study as I was leaving Coleshill, and expressed himself warmly with respect to my labours; regretting the victory of the other side, he declared that, as the question of Protection would be disposed of, one of the two seats would be safe upon a future contest.

‘And who,’ asked the old gentleman, with a benevolent grin on his face, ‘who is going to pay your expenses?’

‘Goodness knows, sir,’ said I; ‘I hope they won’t come down upon me. I haven’t a thousand pounds in the world, unless I tap my fortune.’

‘Well,’ said his Lordship, with a chuckle, ‘I haven’t paid my subscription to Brooks’s yet, so I’ll hand it over to you,’ and he gave me a cheque for £500.

The balance was obtained through Mr. Ellice from the patronage Secretary to the Treasury. At the next election, as Lord Radnor predicted, Lord Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury’s eldest son, won one of the two seats for the Liberals with the greatest ease.

As Coleshill was an open house to me from that time as long as Lord Radnor lived, I cannot take leave of the dear old man without an affectionate word at parting. Creevey has an ill-natured fling at him, as he has at everybody else, but a kinder-hearted and more perfect gentleman would be difficult to meet with. His personality was a marked one. He was a little man, with very plain features, a punch-like nose, an extensive mouth, and hardly a hair on his head. But in spite of these peculiarities, his face was pleasant to look at, for it was invariably animated by a sweet smile, a touch of humour, and a decided air of dignity. Born in 1779, he dressed after the orthodox Whig fashion of his youth, in buff and blue, his long-tailed coat reaching almost to his heels. His manner was a model of courtesy and simplicity. He used antiquated expressions: called London ‘Lunnun,’ Rome ‘Room,’ a balcony a ‘balcÖny’; he always spoke of the clergyman as the ‘pearson,’ and called his daughter Lady Mary, ‘Meary.’ Instead of saying ‘this day week’ he would say this day sen’nit’ (for sen’night).

The independence of his character was very noticeable. As an instance: A party of twenty people, say, would be invited for a given day. Abundance of carriages would be sent to meet the trains, so that all the guests would arrive in ample time for dinner. It generally happened that some of them, not knowing the habits of the house, or some duchess or great lady who might assume that clocks were made for her and not she for clocks, would not appear in the drawing-room till a quarter of an hour after the dinner gong had sounded. If anyone did so, he or she would find that everybody else had got through soup and fish. If no one but Lady Mary had been down when dinner was announced, his Lordship would have offered his arm to his daughter, and have taken his seat at the table alone. After the first night, no one was ever late. In the morning he read prayers to the household before breakfast with the same precise punctuality.

Lady Mary Bouverie, his unmarried daughter, was the very best of hostesses. The house under her management was the perfection of comfort. She married an old and dear friend of mine, Sir James Wilde, afterwards the Judge, Lord Penzance. I was his ‘best man.’

My ‘Ride over the Rocky Mountains’ was now published; and, as the field was a new one, the writer was rewarded, for a few weeks, with invitations to dinner, and the usual tickets for ‘drums’ and dances. To my astonishment, or rather to my alarm, I received a letter from the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (Charles Fox, or perhaps Sir George Simpson had, I think, proposed me—I never knew), to say that I had been elected a member. Nothing was further from my ambition. The very thought shrivelled me with a sense of ignorance and insignificance. I pictured to myself an assembly of old fogies crammed with all the ‘ologies. I broke into a cold perspiration when I fancied myself called upon to deliver a lecture on the comparative sea-bottomy of the Oceanic globe, or give my theory of the simultaneous sighting by ‘little Billee’ of ‘Madagascar, and North, and South Amerikee.’ Honestly, I had not the courage to accept; and, young Jackanapes as I was, left the Secretary’s letter unanswered.

But a still greater honour—perhaps the greatest compliment I ever had paid me—was to come. I had lodgings at this time in an old house, long since pulled down, in York Street. One day, when I was practising the fiddle, who should walk into my den but Rogers the poet! He had never seen me in his life. He was in his ninetieth year, and he had climbed the stairs to the first floor to ask me to one of his breakfast parties. To say nothing of Rogers’ fame, his wealth, his position in society, those who know what his cynicism and his worldliness were, will understand what such an effort, physical and moral, must have cost him. He always looked like a death’s head, but his ghastly pallor, after that Alpine ascent, made me feel as if he had come—to stay.

These breakfasts were entertainments of no ordinary distinction. The host himself was of greater interest than the most eminent of his guests. All but he, were more or less one’s contemporaries: Rogers, if not quite as dead as he looked, was ancient history. He was old enough to have been the father of Byron, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Moore. He was several years older than Scott, or Wordsworth, or Coleridge, and only four years younger than Pitt. He had known all these men, and could, and did, talk as no other could talk, of all of them. Amongst those whom I met at these breakfasts were Cornewall Lewis, Delane, the Grotes, Macaulay, Mrs. Norton, Monckton Milnes, William Harcourt (the only one younger than myself), but just beginning to be known, and others of scarcely less note.

During the breakfast itself, Rogers, though seated at table in an armchair, took no part either in the repast or in the conversation; he seemed to sleep until the meal was over. His servant would then place a cup of coffee before him, and, like a Laputian flapper, touch him gently on the shoulder. He would at once begin to talk, while others listened. The first time I witnessed this curious resurrection, I whispered something to my neighbour, at which he laughed. The old man’s eye was too sharp for us.

‘You are laughing at me,’ said he; ‘I dare say you young gentlemen think me an old fellow; but there are younger than I who are older. You should see Tommy Moore. I asked him to breakfast, but he’s too weak—weak here, sir,’ and he tapped his forehead. ‘I’m not that.’ (This was the year that Moore died.) He certainly was not; but his whole discourse was of the past. It was as though he would not condescend to discuss events or men of the day. What were either to the days and men that he had known—French revolutions, battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo, a Nelson and a Buonaparte, a Pitt, a Burke, a Fox, a Johnson, a Gibbon, a Sheridan, and all the men of letters and all the poets of a century gone by? Even Macaulay had for once to hold his tongue; and could only smile impatiently at what perhaps he thought an old man’s astonishing garrulity. But if a young and pretty woman talked to him, it was not his great age that he vaunted, nor yet the ‘pleasures of memory’—one envied the adroitness of his flattery, and the gracefulness of his repartee.

My friend George Cayley had a couple of dingy little rooms between Parliament Street and the river. Much of my time was spent there with him. One night after dinner, quite late, we were building castles amidst tobacco clouds, when, following a ‘May I come in?’ Tennyson made his appearance. This was the first time I had ever met him. We gave him the only armchair in the room; and pulling out his dudeen and placing afoot on each side of the hob of the old-fashioned little grate, he made himself comfortable before he said another word. He then began to talk of pipes and tobacco. And never, I should say, did this important topic afford so much ingenious conversation before. We discussed the relative merits of all the tobaccos in the world—of moist tobacco and dry tobacco, of old tobacco and new tobacco, of clay pipes and wooden pipes and meerschaum pipes. What was the best way to colour them, the advantages of colouring them, the beauty of the ‘culotte,’ the coolness it gave to the smoke, &c. We listened to the venerable sage—he was then forty-three and we only five or six and twenty—as we should have listened to a Homer or an Aristotle, and he thoroughly enjoyed our appreciation of his jokes.

Some of them would have startled such of his admirers who knew him only by his poems; for his stories were anything but poetical—rather humorous one might say, on the whole. Here’s one of them: he had called last week on the Duchess of Sutherland at Stafford House. Her two daughters were with her, the Duchess of Argyll and the beautiful Lady Constance Grosvenor, afterwards Duchess of Westminster. They happened to be in the garden. After strolling about for a while, the Mama Duchess begged him to recite some of his poetry. He chose ‘Come into the garden, Maud’—always a favourite of the poet’s, and, as may be supposed, many were the fervid exclamations of ‘How beautiful!’ When they came into the house, a princely groom of the chambers caught his eye and his ear, and, pointing to his own throat, courteously whispered: ‘Your dress is not quite as you would wish it, sir.’

‘I had come out without a necktie; and there I was, spouting my lines to the three Graces, as dÉcolletÉ as a strutting turkey cock.’

The only other allusion to poetry or literature that night was a story I told him of a Mr. Thomas Wrightson, a Yorkshire banker, and a fanatical Swedenborgian. Tommy Wrightson, who was one of the most amiable and benevolent of men, spent his life in making a manuscript transcript of Swedenborg’s works. His writing was a marvel of calligraphic art; he himself, a curiosity. Swedenborg was for him an avatar; but if he had doubted of Tennyson’s ultimate apotheosis, I think he would have elected to seek him in ‘the other place.’ Anyhow, Mr. Wrightson avowed to me that he repeated ‘Locksley Hall’ every morning of his life before breakfast. This I told Tennyson. His answer was a grunt; and in a voice from his boots, ‘Ugh! enough to make a dog sick!’ I did my utmost to console him with the assurance that, to the best of my belief, Mr. Wrightson had once fallen through a skylight.

As illustrating the characters of the admired and his admirer, it may be related that the latter, wishing for the poet’s sign-manual, wrote and asked him for it. He addressed Tennyson, whom he had never seen, as ‘My dear Alfred.’ The reply, which he showed to me, was addressed ‘My dear Tom.’