Part 5

Colonel Wylde, my host at the barracks when the family house on the common was full, played a part which relieved him from the humdrum of military life. He spoke Spanish fluently, and, at a time when such a man was much wanted by the Government, he was employed on a mission to Spain; and afterwards, when Prince Albert became one of our royal family, he was appointed as his equerry, and became a great favourite at court. He was my uncle’s closest friend; but on the command of a brigade falling vacant, Wylde, then general, was given the appointment, though one below my uncle in seniority, on whom by custom it should have devolved, and this one incident cooled the warm friendship of a long life.

Owing to his urbanity, his knowledge of life, and his pleasant face, Wylde became a great favourite with the royal family, the queen, the princes and princesses, all of whom loaded him with presents. Prince Albert pressed on him a baronetcy, which, from a mistake in the bestowal of his early affections, he could not accept. It was an arbitrary act of the Duke of Cambridge to break through the rules of the service and give him a brigade which was due to another, to a friend; perhaps he should have refused, but doubtless the pressure on all sides was heavy, not to mention that Wylde had a family which would have been large if divided between two.

What made this brigade business more aggravating was, that the duke had contracted an intimacy with my uncle and his family, and was really his friend.

XVII.

Leaving Woolwich, I went on a long visit to my relations, the Wallingers, with whom I had passed so many happy holidays while at school.

Seaford occupies a line on the southern coast most charming to the eye, but its beauty has been its ruin. A picturesque expanse of back water extends from its magnificent cliff to Newhaven, and the time came when its decaying vegetation generated typhoid fever, which destroyed the reputation of the place, while it decimated the inhabitants.

Another calamity followed: a high spring tide, not so many years ago, washed away the houses in front of the sea, and overflowed the streets. Repairs have been made, new structures raised, private houses, hotels, and a convalescent hospital; but it is no longer the Seaford it was of old, in its rotten-borough days.

I was once more there with my kind aunt, and an uncle whose brow smiled while it frowned. There were two branches of Wallinger; my uncle was a cadet of the elder branch, then represented by the Rev. John Wallinger, the disinherited heir of Hare Hall, who went from the law to the Church for the love of Calvin.

The younger branch was represented more to one’s taste by the Rev. William Wallinger and his brother Arnold, a sergeant-at-law. John was too busily engaged on Calvin’s affairs to visit Seaford at this time, but William was in a manner settled there with his pupil, the young Lord Pelham. Other members of the family came there to make up a seaside season; among them the wife and daughters of William Roberts, who was Teller of the Exchequer, an office held by his father before him, both renowned epicures, who held to the axiom that a good cook was three hundred and sixty-five blessings a year. Mrs. Roberts was a sister of the Rev. John, and brought with her a string of seven daughters, all less beautiful than their mother. Then the family of Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary, added to the list of visitors, he being an old friend of all.

Mrs. Nussey was a very lovely woman. She was the daughter of Mr. Walker, her husband’s predecessor at court; in fact, the Walkers and Nusseys, in turn or together, had been apothecaries to the royal family time out of mind, and it was said that the late Mr. Walker was the only man who knew how to reach the vein in George the Fourth’s fat arm.

Nussey, whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and that the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable.

Nussey was a man deservedly esteemed; he had that gracious manner which comes often from enjoying the confidence of the great.

I must say a few words more about William Wallinger. Any attempt to describe his countenance would be made utterly in vain; it is in this that the artist may assert his superiority to the writer. No one ever saw him without surprise to find himself in company with so much grace and manly beauty. He was too gentlemanly for a king, too quietly self-possessed for a noble, too impressive in manner for any other human being but himself. He inherited a good fortune; he might have had the pick of the country in preferment had he so chosen, but he refused profitable livings, among others that of Stanmer, a village in Lord Chichester’s park, preferring modest pulpits and independence. He was much thought of by the people at Hastings for a period. There Lord Chichester had a chapel built for him; but he often changed his residence and varied his duties. He was attached to Tunbridge Wells, where his sister, Mrs. Jederé Fisher, resided at her seat called Great Culverden. She was the widow of Mr. Jederé Fisher, of Ealing Park, Middlesex, a charming residence, sold later on to Sir William Lawrence, the eminent surgeon, now cut up into streets and villas.

Her son is a well-known Kentish magnate.

XVIII.

As a rudiment of that vaulting ambition and its consequences which grew up in me by degrees, and has, I lament to say, remained with me, though now grown prudent and steady, the better aims of which I have striven to fulfil, I may mention here, in taking leave of my boyhood, that there was a bath at Islington called Peerless Pool, to which in summer the boys of the school were sent to bathe. It was a large mass of water, oblong in shape, with a wide promenade. There we would spend a whole afternoon, sent there by the authorities when the half-holiday was at hand. There, to excite the wonder and applause of the other boys, I punished myself by taking the longest run to the water’s edge that was obtainable within the enclosure, and leaping somersault fashion into the air to a great height, and reaching the water in a seated posture. In doing this I entailed on myself a punishment equal to being flogged. Being somewhat sheepish at the age of fifteen, I did not stand very high in the estimation of my uncle, General Gordon, while staying with him at Woolwich, when one day he took me down to the Thames to bathe. There was a platform, probably for the soldiers to jump from into the water; this afforded me a long run, and I resolved on performing my feat. My uncle was perfectly amazed at it, and often alluded to it with surprise in later years.

After this display of my pluck, he was much in favour of my going into the army.

By this time my mother was gravitating southwards with my sister and brother, that she might be near her sisters; she accordingly took a house at Lewes, where there was a good grammar school suitable for my brother.

The process of intellectual growth in all probability differs in individuals; what it was in me I am able to state. It is my opinion that with the same organism as I now have, with which I can grasp and master any subject, not much matter what it is, I should have made but a poor show of intellect but for certain elements of a moral nature. The first of these is a sense of one’s own nothingness without knowledge; the second is a desire for even more knowledge than most persons possess.

All this is emotional, but it supplies an impulse to intellectual motor power, which, when traced out, proves to be of a very simple kind, consisting of impressions derived from without being reiterated within, and inspected over and over again. Take several brains of the same capacity: one man has not the impulse of ambition or desire. Say to him—

“All the world’s a stage.” His ear takes the words to his brain, and they are lodged there; he can repeat them from memory of sound. Say to another—

“All the world’s a stage.” He will be impressed, first by words, on receiving them, and will repeat them mentally, and in doing so will see that he is reiterating a pre-existing mental impression; one which at some time he had derived through the eye; he will see a stage with men and women on it—the players. He will see these making “their exits and their entrances,” and by reiterated observation of old impressions, which run parallel, he will observe men and women actively employed in the world. By a like process of observing old impressions mentally, he will not only witness the phenomena of human life, but will undergo the appropriate emotion even before the phenomena are realized, the emotion leading up to the idea.

Now all this requires previous knowledge, without which no extended train of thought can be effectively carried out; whence it is that those who are ambitious and have a desire for knowledge, will acquire it at every expense, both of time and labour, and will so become accustomed to keeping their native intellect in play.

XIX.

I had taken leave of boyhood and entered on the period of youth—a time when neither children nor men were found to be suitable companions. The three epochs in our lives are pretty equally divided: that of childhood, owing to the feebler action of the forces, appears to pass away very slowly, and ending at our fifteenth or sixteenth year seems interminable; longer than the time it takes to advance from forty to seventy years of age, and quite as long as to go onwards from fifteen to forty years.

Of course there is an earlier and a later youth, and it is to the first that the preceding remark chiefly applies, the period when ignorance is not strange.

At this early time we do not recognize nature otherwise than as being ourselves, or in any way apart from us; it is later that the line of demarkation draws itself between the inner and outer world; and it is then that time seems to move.

I suppose it was owing to a species of honesty, but I found, very tryingly, at this time, that my self-assurance and my knowledge were in strict proportion; I was not, in fact, presumptuous; but of great modesty.

I must put to my credit a habit of not allowing a moment of ignorance to pass by without rectifying it by questioning either books or persons, and I often learnt more from others than from books. To this day I never come across a man possessed of special experience without questioning him as if I were engaged in a research. Not long ago, a gentleman who had been twenty years in the Fiji Islands, said of me that I had extracted more information from him respecting the people and country in an hour’s conversation, than had been elicited from him by all his friends put together, during the year he had spent in London as commissioner from the islands during the Colonial Exhibition.

I trace the increase of this habit upon me to the practice of minute diagnosis which belongs to the physician. By its means, at all events, I accumulated corners of knowledge, which few appeared to possess besides myself.

In a country town there is often a man or two of eminent attainments who is buried alive. It was so at Lewes, a feeble, antiquated presentiment of civilization in itself; but it contained Gideon Mantell, the great geologist, who, searching Tilgate Forest, became the discoverer of the Iguanodon, which is now visible in the South Kensington Museum.

In those days all county towns were alike in essentials, and Lewes was not a bad typical example. With a small population it returned two members to Parliament, both baronets, both wearing pigtails, both having parks within a drive. There was Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, and Sir George Shiffner of Combe Place. Great men were greater in those days than they are now, or will ever be again. Sir John looked a great man. Sir George looked only an important one.

Sir John was tall, slim, upright, with the look of a diagnostic, in whose presence a horse resolved itself into its elements. The whip in his hand told the man. When either of these worthies appeared in the quiet streets—and quiet they were, except on market days—the shop-keepers were seen standing at their doors as if they were their own customers. The apparition of Sir John or Sir George was like that of Hermes, when, formerly, the god visited Athens.

Like everything else that is worn out, Lewes was discontented with its lot. Not many miles south was Seaford, a rotten borough, and, in the distance, Old Sarum, and this was more than the less prosperous inhabitants of Lewes could endure. They must have reform, and it came.

Like many individuals, they did not know when they were well off.

After having two baronets at their command, both with pigtails, they are no longer a parliamentary borough; even their ancient grammar school is turned into a commercial Academy, no longer a Plato at its head.

What need is there of eternal retribution when men are everlastingly punishing themselves?

XX.

Like most other county towns Lewes had many mansions. These in olden times were the winter residences of nobles and squires, and, at their death, of their relicts, for the women always survived the men. It was considered in those days that the taste of port wine struck the highest note on the palatal gamut, and that gout, though painful, was a distinction. The best lives seldom exceeded sixty-nine. The vesical and gall compartments at that age, generally, had completed their mineralogical collection, and death was not pleasant.

Many of these mansions had the charms of not having been decorated or repaired for a hundred years, whence they looked much the same as when inhabited by the dowagers of bygone generations. So sensible were some of the later occupants of this, that they preserved them in their pristine state, and sat in them in old armchairs till they imagined themselves to be ancestors; and in an instance or two donned the pigtail to complete the illusion. So honourable was this emblem, that no tradesman, however mean his calling, could wear it without being spoken of as the old gentleman, and he doubtless felt himself to be such, though he might be serving a customer with a jar of spermaceti oil.

As aforesaid, Gideon Mantell was an inhabitant of Lewes, struggling for fame by his researches within the chalk strata, and for a livelihood by his practice as a surgeon and apothecary, in which he had a fair amount of success, no doubt due to his great abilities, but in the estimation of many to the flash of his surroundings. His gig and groom were models as they waited at his door. His coat of arms embraced your vision as it shone in the fan-light and whispered of greatness within. He was tall, graciously graceful, and flexible, a naturalist, realizing his own lordship of the creation.

Mantell had a brother in his business, a man, short and deformed, of a quiet, obliging manner. His name was Joshua. He had a son who also made himself heard in later times from the wilds of New Zealand, as a successful scientific explorer.

Some years later the good Earl of Egremont, lord of Petworth Castle, great in his generosity, presented Mantell with a large sum of money to start him in a spacious mansion at Brighton, where he might set up his fine museum, and pursue his profession in a wider field. Removing to this from Lewes he still pursued his science, but the sort of ground he needed was preoccupied, and, disposing of his collection to the trustees of the British Museum, he migrated finally to a suburb of London, I think it was to Clapham.

Had Government allowed such a man as Mantell a thousand a year for the purposes of science, he would have brought the geology of his day to perfection! How creditably they might have amended the sacrifice by withholding the £70,000 from the British Gallery for the purchase of a sham Raphael, and a preposterous Rembrandt, which the pencils of those artists never touched—an invalid housemaid on a throne as Virgin, and a Charles the King on a cart-horse! Raphael painted only beauty, Rembrandt only grace. But the English are the meanest judges of art in Europe. An Italian picture-dealer would have set them right in a few minutes.

What have the trustees done with those fabulous Correggios, which once made such a figure and were shelved to the entrance passage, when the National Gallery was still in Mr. Angerstein’s mansion in Pall Mall?

“Per arte e l’inganno, Si vive mezzo l’anno; Per inganno e l’arte Si vive l’altro parte.”

There were other worthies in this town of Lewes: Mr. Horsfield, author of the “History and Antiquities of Lewes;” Mr. Lower, a stationer, who wrote on Sussex worthies; and the master of the Grammar School, Dr. Proctor, whose voice crackled emphasis and accent. He was one of the rolling stones that gather no moss; Lewes failed him and he took a mansion towards Kemp town; he was tempted from his school there to Jersey, and became Principal of its College, but this did not fit him for any length of time. My brother, who was his pupil, met him now and then in after days in the streets of London; he was then always on his way to see the bishop.

XXI.

All this time I was a student of medical science under a truly eminent man, Thomas Hodson, the highest authority in his profession within the bounds of Sussex. His career and station gave him every claim to be classed with the worthies of his age. He was the friend and fellow-student of Astley Cooper, and the other aristocrats of surgical art. All acknowledged him as their equals, though his skill and abilities were in a measure hidden from the admiration of the world. He was numbered among the leading lithotomists, having extracted the stone by means of the greatest operation in surgery, somewhere about a hundred times, with unvarying success.

It was in reflecting on the skill of such men that I always regarded surgery as a science far above all that physic can attain to.

Thomas Hodson is a name not to be forgotten. He loved his art passionately, and he would discourse on it with all the fervour it deserved. It is an art; but look at its foundation! The human frame is a transparency to the surgeon’s eyes. He is never in the dark, but sees his way clearly, with a perfect knowledge of what has to be done from first to last. It is otherwise with physic: the physician can fulfil certain indications, with certain remedies; these very few in number. For the rest, how these operate, what work they perform in modifying function he can never fully foresee. Nor will science ever reach such a pitch as to enable him to trace the changes which occur in the system, under the influence of a single dose.

He can swim, but he is mostly out of his depth, and that too often in troubled waters.

On the other hand, physicians generally used to receive a better education than surgeons; such of them as respect their position, make themselves acquainted with every branch of knowledge, whether in literature, science, or art; in social life all doubtful questions, when all others are at a loss, are referred to them; and it is fully expected of them that they will have a ready reply.

Hodson was one of the most amiable men I ever knew, and his manners were sweet and elegant to such a degree as to make it deserving of mention that on being thwarted he became the most passionate of men. The world, then, seemed hardly large enough to hold him. Such a trifle as the loss of a letter, or of a book, would set him off. Smiling, pale with anger, he would exclaim, “Will you look about for me?” Then, rapping on the table with his bent forefinger, forcibly enough to crack the mahogany, he would shout, “I have looked high, I have looked low; I have looked uphill, I have looked downhill, and I have looked on level ground. Help me for my sake; if you won’t do so for my sake, help me for God’s sake; and if you won’t help me for God’s sake, do so for Jesus Christ’s sake; for they say he was a good ⸺!”

Hodson was a man of middle stature, fair, although old; bald, with a finely shaped head, and silvery hair; with classic features, and a most intelligent expression. His manner was courteous and, in its particular fashion, graceful. It is no wonder that such a man, gifted as he was, should have been the delight of the neighbouring gentry, and of the greater men of the town. When summoned to Glynde or Firle, the residences of Lords Hampden and Gage, he was always a desired guest at the table of those nobles; and no more genial and amusing one was anywhere to be found.

Glynde, the inheritance of the late Speaker, Lord Hampden by creation, sad to say at this hour dead, a descendant of the great patriot, is the most charming house, perhaps, of any in the south. A large Elizabethan mansion, a pleasant park, downs covered with the choicest breed of sheep in the known world, was even made more celebrated by the tenant farmer John Ellman, than by the lords of the soil.

In those times there was such a thing as south-down mutton!

John Ellman, of Glynde, was a man known to the whole agricultural world. To those who never saw him, he was known by his full-length portrait, as was Coke of Norfolk, and other celebrities of his day, to be seen in the window of a corner shop, between St. James’s Street and Pall Mall, kept by a gentleman who had the aspect of George the Fourth, and was supposed to be a son of the monarch; giving one a good idea of what the king would have been, had he been born a commoner.

XXII.

Ellman, of Glynde, was a knee-breeches man, with top-boots, tall, coated for horseback, and with a characteristic farmer’s hat, not scanty of brim. As such I remember him; but when alone, or even speaking to another, there seemed something wanting to him, and this was a—Cattle Show.

I recollect his daughter—an extremely pretty girl, sixty-five years ago. I used to wonder how such a delicacy could come of so purely masculine a breed of men.

The south-down sheep is no doubt fully kept on at Glynde; the late Earl of Chichester, too, is said to have kept up the breed, but it is to be feared that it is less profitable than the fat, or wool-growing sorts, which yield the worst mutton to the market, and the best wool; matured for the butcher within a year.

“Sic transit gloria brebis.”

Mr. Hodson took me with him to the funeral of the then last Lord Hampden, who only enjoyed his estate for twelve months. I entered the vault; the crimson velvet and gilt nails were as fresh on the coffin of the previous lord as on the one now placed by its side. All the other red velvet coffins had gone brown.

A gentleman, it was Mr. Cumberland, of the mint, who was related to Lord Hampden, and used to stay with him at the old family seat in Buckinghamshire, told me that there was always a table in the family pew on Sunday morning, with wine glasses on it, and a bottle of port wine, with which the friends regaled themselves during the weary service at church, which, as a duty, they attended, so setting a good example to the village folk.

It is a useless fashion to bury the dead in red velvet, as a finish off to the oak, and the leaden coffins. However, all this cost is met out of the pockets of the dead, who can no longer manage their own affairs, and have all the appearance of bearing it with patient submission, whatever their last wish might be!

Lewes stands on a spur of the downs, the river Ouse runs at its base. Between this and the ascent, School Hill, a turning to the left leads to an adjoining village, Southover, deserving of mention, as once the seat of a monastery of historic interest. There, too, is what was Mr. Newton’s residence, the Priory, a fine old Gothic structure, that is to say, if it still is there.