THE FRIENDS OF FOX HOW

It remains for me now to say something of those friends of Fox How and my father whose influence, or whose living presence, made the atmosphere in which the second generation of children who loved Fox How grew up.

Wordsworth died in 1850, the year before I was born. He and my grandfather were much attached to each other--"old Coleridge," says my grandfather, "inoculated a little knot of us with the love of Wordsworth"--though their politics were widely different, and the poet sometimes found it hard to put up with the reforming views of the younger man. In a letter printed in Stanley's Life my grandfather mentions "a good fight" with Wordsworth over the Reform Bill of 1832, on a walk to Greenhead Ghyll. And there is a story told of a girl friend of the family who, once when Wordsworth had been paying a visit at Fox How, accompanied him and the Doctor part of the way home to Rydal Mount. Something was inadvertently said to stir the old man's Toryism, and he broke out in indignant denunciation of some views expressed by Arnold. The storm lasted all the way to Pelter Bridge, and the girl on Arnold's left stole various alarmed glances at him to see how he was taking it. He said little or nothing, and at Pelter Bridge they all parted, Wordsworth going on to Rydal Mount, and the other two turning back toward Fox How. Arnold paced along, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground, and his companion watched him, till he suddenly threw back his head with a laugh of enjoyment.--"What beautiful English the old man talks!"

The poet complained sometimes--as I find from an amusing passage in the letter to Mr. Howson quoted below, that he could not see enough of his neighbor, the Doctor, on a mountain walk, because Arnold was always so surrounded with children and pupils, "like little dogs" running round and after him. But no differences, great or small, interfered with his constant friendship to Fox How. The garden there was largely planned by him during the family absences at Rugby; the round chimneys of the house are said to be of his design; and it was for Fox How, which still possesses the MS., that the fine sonnet was written, beginning--

Wansfell, this household has a favored lot
Living with liberty on thee to gaze--

a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines that Wordsworth ever wrote.

It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography. But from the letters in my hands I glean a few things worth recording. Here, for instance, is a passing picture of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth in the Fox How drawing-room together, in January, 1848, which I find in a letter from my grandmother to my father:

Matt has been very much pleased, I think, by what he has seen of dear
old Wordsworth since he has been at home, and certainly he manages to
draw him out very well. The old man was here yesterday, and as he sat on
the stool in the corner beside the fire which you knew so well, he
talked of various subjects of interest, of Italian poetry, of Coleridge,
etc., etc.; and he looked and spoke with more vigor than he has often
done lately.

But the poet's health was failing. His daughter Dora's death in 1847 had hit him terribly hard, and his sister's state--the helpless though gentle insanity of the unique, the beloved Dorothy--weighed heavily on his weakening strength. I find a touching picture of him in the unpublished letter referred to on a previous page, written in this very year--1848--to Dean Howson, as a young man, by his former pupil, the late Duke of Argyll, the distinguished author of The Reign of Law--which Dean Howson's son and the Duke's grandson allow me to print. The Rev. J.S. Howson, afterward Dean of Chester, married a sister of the John Cropper who married Susan Arnold, and was thus a few years later brought into connection with the Arnolds and Fox How. The Duke and Duchess had set out to visit both the Lakes and the Lakes "celebrities," advised, evidently, as to their tour, by the Duke's old tutor, who was already familiar with the valleys and some of their inmates. Their visit to Fox How is only briefly mentioned, but of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount the Duke gives a long account. The picture, first, of drooping health and spirits, and then of the flaming out of the old poetic fire, will, I think, interest any true Wordsworthian.

On Saturday [writes the Duke] we reached Ambleside and soon after drove
to Rydal Mount. We found the Poet seated at his fireside, and a little
languid in manner. He became less so as he talked.... He talked
incessantly, but not generally interestingly.... I looked at him often
and asked myself if that was the man who had stamped the impress of his
own mind so decidedly on a great part of the literature of his age! He
took us to see a waterfall near his house, and talked and chattered, but
said nothing remarkable or even thoughtful. Yet I could see that all
this was only that we were on the surface, and did not indicate any
decay of mental powers. [Still] we went away with no other impression
than the vaguest of having seen the man, whose writings we knew so
well--and with no feeling that we had seen anything of the mind which
spoke through them.

On the following day, Sunday, the Duke with a friend walked over to Rydal, but found no one at the Mount but an invalid lady, very old, and apparently paralyzed, "drawn in a bath chair by a servant." They did not realize that the poor sufferer, with her wandering speech and looks, was Dorothy Wordsworth, whose share in her great brother's fame will never be forgotten while literature lasts.

In the evening, however--

... after visiting Mrs. Arnold we drove together to bid Wordsworth
good-by, as we were to go next morning. We found the old man as before,
seated by the fireside and languid and sleepy in manner. Again he
awakened as conversation went on, and, a stranger coming in, we rose to
go away. He seemed unwilling that we should go so soon, and said he
would walk out with us. We went to the mound in front, and the Duchess
then asked if he would repeat some of his own lines to us. He said he
hardly thought he could do that, but that he would have been glad to
read some to us. We stood looking at the view for some time, when Mrs.
Wordsworth came out and asked us back to the house to take some tea.
This was just what we wanted. We sat for about half an hour at tea,
during which I tried to direct the conversation to interesting
subjects--Coleridge, Southey, etc. He gave a very different impression
from the preceding evening. His memory seemed clear and unclouded--his
remarks forcible and decided--with some tendency to run off to
irrelevant anecdote.
When tea was over, we renewed our request that he should read to us. He
said, "Oh dear, that is terrible!" but consented, asking what we chose.
He jumped at "Tintern Abbey" in preference to any part of the
"Excursion."
He told us he had written "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, taking four days to
compose it; the last twenty lines or so being composed as he walked down
the hill from Clifton to Bristol. It was curious to feel that we were to
hear a Poet read his own verses composed fifty years before.
He read the introductory lines descriptive of the scenery in a low,
clear voice. But when he came to the thoughtful and reflective lines,
his tones deepened and he poured them forth with a fervor and almost
passion of delivery which was very striking and beautiful. I observed
that Mrs. Wordsworth was strongly affected during the reading. The
strong emphasis that he put on the words addressed to the person to whom
the poem is written struck me as almost unnatural at the time. "My DEAR,
DEAR friend!"--and on the words, "In thy wild eyes." It was not till
after the reading was over that we found out that the poor paralytic
invalid we had seen in the morning was the sister to whom "Tintern
Abbey" was addressed, and her condition, now, accounted for the fervor
with which the old Poet read lines which reminded him of their better
days. But it was melancholy to think that the vacant gaze we had seen in
the morning was from the "wild eyes" of 1798.
... We could not have had a better opportunity of bringing out in his
reading the source of the inspiration of his poetry, which it was
impossible not to feel was the poetry of the heart. Mrs. Wordsworth told
me it was the first time he had read since his daughter's death, and
that she was thankful to us for having made him do it, as he was apt to
fall into a listless, languid state. We asked him to come to Inverary.
He said he had not courage; as he had last gone through that country
with his daughter, and he feared it would be too much for him.

Less than two years after this visit, on April 23, 1850, the deathday of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Arnold's youngest daughter, now Miss Arnold of Fox How, was walking with her sister Susan on the side of Loughrigg which overlooks Rydal Mount. They knew that the last hour of a great poet was near--to my aunts, not only a great poet, but the familiar friend of their dead father and all their kindred. They moved through the April day, along the mountainside, under the shadow of death; and, suddenly, as they looked at the old house opposite, unseen hands drew down the blinds; and by the darkened windows they knew that the life of Wordsworth had gone out.

Henceforward, in the family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little lake, and the reflections of island and wood and fell go down and down, unearthly far into the quiet depths, and Wansfell still "parleys with the setting sun." My grandmother writes of her--of "her sweet grace and dignity," and the little friendly acts she is always doing for this person and that, gentle or simple, in the valley--with a tender enthusiasm. She is "dear Mrs. Wordsworth" always, for them all. And it is my joy that in the year 1856 or 1857 my grandmother took me to Rydal Mount, and that I can vividly recollect sitting on a footstool at Mrs. Wordsworth's feet. I see still the little room, with its plain furniture, the chair beside the fire, and the old lady in it. I can still recall the childish feeling that this was no common visit, and the house no common house--that a presence still haunted it. Instinctively the childish mind said to itself, "Remember!"--and I have always remembered.

A few years later I was again, as a child of eight, in Rydal Mount. Mrs. Wordsworth was dead, and there was a sale in the house. From far and near the neighbors came, very curious, very full of real regret, and a little awe-stricken. They streamed through the rooms where the furniture was arranged in lots. I wandered about by myself, and presently came upon something which absorbed me so that I forgot everything else--a store of Easter eggs, with wonderful drawings and devices, made by "James," the Rydal Mount factotum, in the poet's day. I recollect sitting down with them in a nearly empty room, dreaming over them in a kind of ecstasy, because of their pretty, strange colors and pictures.

Fifty-two years passed, and I found myself, in September, 1911, the tenant of a renovated and rebuilt Rydal Mount, for a few autumn weeks. The house was occupied then, and is still occupied by Wordsworth's great-granddaughter and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. Fisher Wordsworth. My eldest daughter was with me, and a strange thing happened to us. I arrived at the Mount before my husband and daughter. She joined me there on September 13th. I remember how eagerly I showed her the many Wordsworthiana in the house, collected by the piety of its mistress--the Haydon portrait on the stairs, and the books, in the small low-ceiled room to the right of the hall, which is still just as it was in Wordsworth's day; the garden, too, and the poet's walk. All my own early recollections were alive; we chattered long and late. And now let the account of what happened afterward be given in my daughter's words as she wrote it down for me the following morning.

RYDAL MOUNT, September 14, 1911.
Last night, my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, over
the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way up the
window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, over the
back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window. The window, a
casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke quite suddenly, at
what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting bolt upright in bed,
looking toward the window. Very bright moonlight was shining into the
room and I could just see the corner of Loughrigg out in the distance.
My first impression was of bright moonlight, but then I became strongly
conscious of the moonlight striking on something, and I saw perfectly
clearly the figure of an old man sitting in the arm-chair by the window.
I said to myself, "That's Wordsworth!" He was sitting with either hand
resting on the arms of the chair, leaning back, his head rather bent,
and he seemed to be looking down straight in front of him with a rapt
expression. He was not looking at me, nor out of the window. The
moonlight lit up the top of his head and the silvery hair and I noticed
that the hair was very thin. The whole impression was of something
solemn and beautiful, and I was not in the very least frightened. As I
looked--I cannot say, when I looked again, for I have no recollection of
ceasing to look, or looking away--the figure disappeared and I became
aware of the empty chair.--I lay back again, and thought for a moment in
a pleased and contented way, "That was Wordsworth." And almost
immediately I must have fallen asleep again. I had not, to my knowledge,
been dreaming about Wordsworth before I awoke; but I had been reading
Hutton's essay on "Wordsworth's Two Styles" out of Knight's
Wordsworthiana, before I fell asleep.
I should add that I had a distinct impression of the high collar and
stock, the same as in the picture on the stairs in this house.

Neither the seer of this striking vision--unique in her experience--nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted--we did not know it till afterward--that the seer of the vision was sleeping in Dorothy Wordsworth's room, where Dorothy spent so many sad years of death-in-life; and that in that very corner by the window Wordsworth must have sat, day after day, when he came to visit what remained to him of that creature of fire and dew, that child of genius, who had been the inspiration and support of his poetic youth.

In these rapid sketches of the surroundings and personal influences amid which my own childhood was passed I have already said something of my father's intimate friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough was, of course, a Rugbeian, and one of Arnold's ablest and most devoted pupils. He was about three years older than my father, and was already a Fellow of Oriel when Thomas Arnold, the younger, was reading for his First. But the difference of age made no difference to the friendship which grew up between them in Oxford, a friendship only less enduring and close than that between Clough and Matthew Arnold, which has been "eternized," to use a word of Fulke Greville's, by the noble dirge of "Thyrsis." Not many years before his own death, in 1895, my father wrote of the friend of his youth:

I loved him, oh, so well: and also respected him more profoundly than
any man, anywhere near my own age, whom I ever met. His pure soul was
without stain: he seemed incapable of being inflamed by wrath, or
tempted to vice, or enslaved by any unworthy passion of any sort. As to
"Philip," something that he saw in me helped to suggest the
character--that was all. There is much in Philip that is Clough himself,
and there is a dialectic force in him that certainly was never in me. A
great yearning for possessing one's soul in freedom--for trampling on
ceremony and palaver, for trying experiments in equality, being common
to me and Philip, sent me out to New Zealand; and in the two years
before I sailed (December, 1847) Clough and I were a great deal
together.

It was partly also the visit paid by my father and his friend, John Campbell Shairp, afterward Principal Shairp of St. Andrew's, to Clough's reading party at Drumnadrochit in 1845, and their report of incidents which had happened to them on their way along the shores of Loch Ericht, which suggested the scheme of the "Bothie." One of the half-dozen short poems of Clough which have entered permanently into literature--Qui laborat oral--was found by my father one morning on the table of his bachelor rooms in Mount Street, after Clough had spent the night on a shake-up in his sitting-room, and on his early departure had left the poem behind him as payment for his night's lodging. In one of Clough's letters to New Zealand I find, "Say not the struggle nought availeth"--another of the half-dozen--written out by him; and the original copy--tibi primo confisum, of the pretty, though unequal verses, "A London Idyll." The little volume of miscellaneous poems, called Ambarvalia, and the "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo-lich" were sent out to New Zealand by Clough, at the same moment that Matt was sending his brother the Poems by A.

Clough writes from Liverpool in February, 1849--having just received Matt's volume:

At last our own Matt's book! Read mine first, my child, if our volumes
go forth together. Otherwise you won't read mine--Ambarvalia, at any
rate--at all. Froude also has published a new book of religious
biography, auto or otherwise (The Nemesis of Faith), and therewithal
resigns his Fellowship. But the Rector (of Exeter) talks of not
accepting the resignation, but having an expulsion--fire and fagot
fashion. Quo usque?

But when the books arrive, my father writes to his sister with affectionate welcome indeed of the Poems by A, but with enthusiasm of the "Bothie."

It greatly surpasses my expectations! It is on the whole a noble poem,
well held together, clear, full of purpose, and full of promise. With
joy I see the old fellow bestiring himself, "awakening like a strong man
out of sleep and shaking his invincible locks"; and if he remains true
and works, I think there is nothing too high or too great to be expected
from him.

"True," and a worker, Clough remained to the last hours of his short life. But in spite of a happy marriage, the burden and perplexity of philosophic thought, together with the strain of failing health, checked, before long, the strong poetic impulse shown in the "Bothie," its buoyant delight in natural beauty, and in the simplicities of human feeling and passion. The "music" of his "rustic flute".

Kept not for long its happy, country tone;
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost, of men who groan.

The poet of the "Bothie" becomes the poet of "Dipsychus," "Easter Day," and the "Amours de Voyage"; and the young republican who writes in triumph--all humorous joy and animation--to my father, from the Paris of 1848, which has just seen the overthrow of Louis Philippe, says, a year later--February 24, 1849:

To-day, my dear brother republican, is the glorious anniversary of '48,
whereof what shall I now say? Put not your trust in republics, nor in
any constitution of man! God be praised for the downfall of Louis
Philippe. This with a faint feeble echo of that loud last year's scream
of "À bas Guizot!" seems to be the sum total. Or are we to salute the
rising sun, with "Vive l'Empereur!" and the green liveries? President
for life I think they'll make him, and then begin to tire of him.
Meanwhile the Great Powers are to restore the Pope and crush the
renascent Roman Republic, of which Joseph Mazzini has just been declared
a citizen!

A few months later, the writer--at Rome--"was in at the death" of this same Roman Republic, listening to the French bombardment in bitterness of soul.

I saw the French enter [he writes to my father]. Unto this has come our
grand Lib. Eq. and Frat. revolution! And then I went to Naples--and
home. I am full of admiration for Mazzini.... But on the
whole--"Farewell Politics!" utterly!--What can I do? Study is much more
to the purpose.

So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough," leaving Oxford and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was remarkable, and will be long read--whether it be poetry or no--by those who find perennial attraction in the lesser-known ways of literature and thought, and at last closed his short life at Florence in 1862, at the age of forty-one, leaving an indelible memory in the hearts of those who had talked and lived with him.

To a boon southern country he is fled,
And now in happier air,
Wandering with the Great Mother's train divine
(And purer or more subtle soul than thee,
I trow the mighty Mother doth not see)
Within a folding of the Apennine,
Thou hearest the immortal chants of old!--

But I remember him, in an English setting, and on the slopes of English hills. In the year 1858, as a child of seven, I was an inmate of a little school kept at Ambleside, by Miss Anne Clough, the poet's sister, afterward the well-known head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and wisest leader in the cause of women. It was a small day-school for Ambleside children of all ranks, and I was one of two boarders, spending my Sundays often at Fox How. I can recall one or two golden days, at long intervals, when my father came for me, with "Mr. Clough," and the two old friends, who, after nine years' separation, had recently met again, walked up the Sweden Bridge lane into the heart of Scandale Fell, while I, paying no more attention to them than they--after a first ten minutes--did to me, went wandering and skipping and dreaming by myself. In those days every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch, every stretch of silken, flower-sown grass, every bend of the wild stream, and all its sounds, whether it chattered gently over stony shallows or leaped full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam--were to me the never-ending joys of a "land of pure delight." Should I find a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew by heart?--or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the big auricula, or streaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead? I might quite safely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took no account, mercifully, of a child's boots and stockings--male tongues, besides, being safely busy with books and politics. Was that a dipper, rising and falling along the stream, or--positively--a fat brown trout in hiding under that shady bank?--or that a buzzard, hovering overhead. Such hopes and doubts kept a child's heart and eyes as quick and busy as the "beck" itself. It was a point of honor with me to get to Sweden Bridge--a rough crossing for the shepherds and sheep, near the head of the valley--before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet over the unprotected edge of its grass-grown arch, blissfully conscious on a summer day of the warm stretches of golden fell folding in the stream, the sheep, the hovering hawks, the stony path that wound up and up to regions beyond the ken of thought; and of myself, queening it there on the weather-worn keystone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physical joy of each contented sense--the sun on my cotton dress, the scents from grass and moss, the marvelous rush of cloud-shadow along the hills, the brilliant browns and blues in the water, the little white stones on its tiny beaches, or the purples of the bigger rocks, whether in the stream or on the mountain-side. How did they come there--those big rocks? I puzzled my head about them a good deal, especially as my father, in the walks we had to ourselves, would sometimes try and teach me a little geology.

I have used the words "physical joy," because, although such passionate pleasure in natural things as has been my constant Helper (in the sense of the Greek [Greek: epikouros]) through life, has connected itself, no doubt, in process of time, with various intimate beliefs, philosophic or religious, as to the Beauty which is Truth, and therewith the only conceivable key to man's experience, yet I could not myself indorse the famous contrast in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," between the "haunting passion" of youth's delight in Nature, and the more complex feeling of later years when Nature takes an aspect colored by our own moods and memories, when our sorrows and reflections enter so much into what we feel about the "bright and intricate device" of earth and her seasons, that "in our life alone doth Nature live." No one can answer for the changing moods that the future, long or short, may bring with it. But so far, I am inclined to think of this quick, intense pleasure in natural things, which I notice in myself and others, as something involuntary and inbred; independent--often selfishly independent--of the real human experience. I have been sometimes ashamed--pricked even with self-contempt--to remember how in the course of some tragic or sorrowful hours, concerning myself, or others of great account to me, I could not help observing some change in the clouds, some effect of color in the garden, some picture on the wall, which pleased me--even for the moment--intensely. The impression would be gone, perhaps, as soon as felt, rebuked by something like a flash of remorse. But it was not in my power to prevent its recurrence. And the delight in natural things--colors, forms, scents--when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended--"as though of hemlock one had drunk." Wordsworth has of course expressed it constantly, though increasingly, as life went on, in combination with his pantheistic philosophy. But it is my belief that it survived in him in its primitive form, almost to the end.

The best and noblest people I have known have been, on the whole--except in first youth--without this correspondence between some constant pleasure-sense in the mind, and natural beauty. It cannot, therefore, be anything to be proud of. But it is certainly something to be glad of--"amid the chances and changes of this mortal life"; it is one of the joys "in widest commonalty spread"--and that may last longest. It is therefore surely to be encouraged both in oneself and in children; and that, although I have often felt that there is something inhuman, or infrahuman, in it, as though the earth-gods in us all--Pan, or Demeter--laid ghostly hands again, for a space, upon the soul and sense that nobler or sadder faiths have ravished from them.

In these Westmorland walks, however, my father had sometimes another companion--a frequent visitor at Fox How, where he was almost another son to my grandmother, and an elder brother to her children. How shall one ever make the later generation understand the charm of Arthur Stanley? There are many--very many--still living, in whom the sense of it leaps up, at the very mention of his name. But for those who never saw him, who are still in their twenties and thirties, what shall I say? That he was the son of a Bishop of Norwich and a member of the old Cheshire family of the Stanleys of Alderley; that he was a Rugby boy and a devoted pupil of Arnold, whose Life he wrote, so that it stands out among the biographies of the century, not only for its literary merit, but for its wide and varied influence on feeling and opinion; that he was an Oxford tutor and Professor all through the great struggle of Liberal thought against the reactionary influences let loose by Newman and the Tractarian movement; that, as Regius Professor at Oxford, and Canon of Canterbury, if he added little to learning, or research, he at least kept alive--by his power of turning all he knew into image and color--that great "art" of history which the Dryasdusts so willingly let die; that as Dean of Westminster, he was still the life and soul of all the Liberalism in the Church, still the same generous friend and champion of all the spiritually oppressed that he had ever been? None of the old "causes" beloved of his youth could ever have said of him, as of so many others:

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat--

He was, no doubt, the friend of kings and princes, and keenly conscious, always, of things long-descended, with picturesque or heroic associations. But it was he who invited Colenso to preach in the Abbey, after his excommunication by the fanatical and now forgotten Bishop of Cape Town; it was he who brought about that famous Communion of the Revisers in the Abbey, where the Unitarian received the Sacrament of Christ's death beside the Wesleyan and the Anglican, and who bore with unflinching courage the idle tumult which followed; it was he, too, who first took special pains to open the historical Abbey to working-men, and to give them an insight into the meaning of its treasures. He was not a social reformer in the modern sense; that was not his business. But his unfailing power of seeing and pouncing upon the interesting--the dramatic--in any human lot, soon brought him into relation with men of callings and types the most different from his own; and for the rest he fulfilled to perfection that hard duty--"the duty to our equals"--on which Mr. Jowett once preached a caustic and suggestive sermon. But for him John Richard Green would have abandoned history, and student after student, heretic after heretic, found in him the man who eagerly understood them and chivalrously fought for them.

And then, what a joy he was to the eye! His small spare figure, miraculously light, his delicate face of tinted ivory--only that ivory is not sensitive and subtle, and incredibly expressive, as were the features of the little Dean; the eager, thin-lipped mouth, varying with every shade of feeling in the innocent great soul behind it; the clear eyes of china blue; the glistening white hair, still with the wave and spring of youth in it; the slender legs, and Dean's dress, which becomes all but the portly, with, on festal occasions, the red ribbon of the Bath crossing the mercurial frame: there are still a few pictures and photographs by which these characteristics are dimly recalled to those at least who knew the living man. To my father, who called him "Arthur," and to all the Fox How circle, he was the most faithful of friends, though no doubt my father's conversion to Catholicism to some extent, in later years, separated him from Stanley. In the letter I have printed on a former page, written on the night before my father left England for New Zealand in 1847, and cherished by its recipient all his life, there is a yearning, personal note, which was, perhaps, sometimes lacking in the much-surrounded, much-courted Dean of later life. It was not that Arthur Stanley, any more than Matthew Arnold, ever became a worldling in the ordinary sense. But "the world" asks too much of such men as Stanley. It heaps all its honors and all its tasks upon them, and without some slight stiffening of its substance the exquisite instrument cannot meet the strain.

Mr. Hughes always strongly denied that the George Arthur of Tom Brown's Schooldays had anything whatever to do with Arthur Stanley. But I should like to believe that some anecdote of Stanley's schooldays had entered at least into the well-known scene where Arthur, in class, breaks down in construing the last address of Helen to the dead Hector. Stanley's memory, indeed, was alive with the great things or the picturesque detail of literature and history, no less than with the humorous or striking things of contemporary life. I remember an amusing instance of it at my own wedding breakfast. Stanley married us, and a few days before he had buried Frederick Denison Maurice. His historical sense was pleased by the juxtaposition of the two names Maurice and Arnold, suggested by the funeral of Maurice and the marriage of Arnold's granddaughter. The consequence was that his speech at the wedding breakfast was quite as much concerned with "graves and worms and epitaphs" as with things hymeneal. But from "the little Dean" all things were welcome.

My personal memory of him goes back to much earlier days. As a child at Fox How, he roused in me a mingled fascination and terror. To listen to him quoting Shakspeare or Scott or Macaulay was fascination; to find his eye fixed on one, and his slender finger darting toward one, as he asked a sudden historical question--"Where did Edward the First die?"--"Where was the Black Prince buried?"--was terror, lest, at seven years old, one should not be able to play up. I remember a particular visit of his to Fox How, when the dates and places of these royal deaths and burials kept us--myself in particular--in a perpetual ferment. It must, I think, have been when he was still at Canterbury, investigating, almost with the zest and passion of the explorer of Troy or Mycenae, what bones lie hid, and where, under the Cathedral floor, what sands--"fallen from the ruined sides of Kings"--that this passion of deaths and dates was upon him. I can see myself as a child of seven or eight, standing outside the drawing-room door at Fox How, bracing myself in a mixture of delight and fear, as to what "Doctor Stanley" might ask me when the door was opened; then the opening, and the sudden sharp turn of the slight figure, writing letters at the middle table, at the sight of "little Mary"--and the expected thunderbolt:

"Where did Henry the Fourth die?"

Confusion--and blank ignorance!

But memory leaps forward to a day four or five years later, when my father and I invaded the dark high room in the old Deanery, and the little Dean standing at his reading-desk. He looks round--sees "Tom," and the child with him. His charming face breaks into a broad smile; he remembers instantly, though it is some years since he and "little Mary" met. He holds out both his hands to the little girl--

"Come and see the place where Henry the Fourth died!"

And off we ran together to the Jerusalem Chamber.

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