Category: Biographies
Of course it was not good taste in Ajax to brag so loudly of being the great-grandson of Jupiter, but then Ulysses need not have snubbed him so fiercely, and then gone on to show how he, too, was god-born, but on the mother’s side as well as on the father’s. Nor was it quite c...
Of course it was not good taste in Ajax to brag so loudly of being the great-grandson of Jupiter, but then Ulysses need not have snubbed him so fiercely, and then gone on to sho...
2. CHAPTER III was born on the 24th of February, 1837, in South Audley Street, in a house long since pulled down, which stood at the southern corner of Hill Street. My father had left the Di...
3. CHAPTER IIIThere are days in a man’s life which he never forgets; his first day at school is one of them. My maiden appearance at Eton was in 1846, sixty-nine years ago at this time of wri...
4. CHAPTER IV“Cretâ an carbone notandi?” The summer holidays of 1851 shall be “noted” with the whitest of chalk. The first three or four days were spent in London exploring the treasures and...
5. CHAPTER VI left Eton at Christmas, 1854, after nearly nine years’ experience of its good and its evil. The last half spent there was not a happy one, though I was high up (second, in fac...
6. CHAPTER VINo one knew who was the unhappy clerk who, in a pessimistic mood, wrote those Dantesque lines with a diamond on a pane of glass in the old Foreign Office in Downing Street. If I...
7. CHAPTER VIITowards the end of November, 1861, there was a moment when it seemed as if a war between England and the United States was inevitable. By the prudence and tact of one man that d...
8. CHAPTER VIIIOn the 10th of March, 1863, I had the honour to be present at the wedding of the Prince of Wales in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor. A number of extra gentlemen-ushers were appoi...
9. CHAPTER IXMy vagabond pen has strayed far from the year 1863; I must retrace my steps. In the month of April of that year my eldest brother, Percy, was married to the brilliant daughter o...
10. CHAPTER XOne day in the month of November, 1863, I agreed to make an exchange for six months with Mr. Locock, the second secretary of Embassy at St. Petersburg—it would be an anachronism...
11. CHAPTER XIThere is an old saying and a true one, that in Russia you see the winter and in Italy you feel it. In the one case the houses are so beautifully warmed and so many precautions a...
12. CHAPTER XIIHappily our life at the Embassy was not all made up of political miscarriages and diplomatic rebuffs. On the 6th (18th) of January we all received a summons to attend the ceremo...
13. CHAPTER XIII“Is there anybody here who can speak English? Oh! IS there anybody here who can speak English?” A piteous cry from a brother Briton in distress must be attended to. It came from...
14. CHAPTER XIVThe year 1864 is sacred to me in that, although it called me away from St. Petersburg, where I was so happy, it also called me to my first taste—a mere glimpse—of that East whic...
15. CHAPTER XVIn “Un Pèlerin d’Angkor,” which for the sake of its wonderful descriptions of tropical scenery is to me one of Pierre Loti’s most charming books, he tells us how when he was a l...
16. CHAPTER XVIWe rode into Peking at the Hata Gate and threading our way through the throng, soon found ourselves outside the Liang Kung Fu, the palace of the Dukes of Liang, which was the En...
17. CHAPTER XVIIMr. Alcock’s first great promotion to be Consul-General in Japan, newly opened to foreigners by Lord Elgin’s treaty of 1858, though it answered well enough, was based upon a mis...
18. CHAPTER XVIIIAlthough in one shape or another I have written a good deal about the Land of the Gods, I have hitherto refrained from saying much about my own personal experience in that count...
19. CHAPTER XIXIn the beginning of 1867 there was a great stir in Japanese politics, and it was evident to those who, like ourselves, were more or less behind the scenes that we were on the ev...