Collections and Recollections | Page 2

story, at any rate, elicited the gracious laughter of Queen Victoria. A pauper who had known better days wrote to thank me for enlivening the monotony of a workhouse infirmary. Literary clerks plied me with questions about the sources of my quotations. A Scotch doctor demurred to the prayer--"Water that spark"--on the ground that the water would put the spark out. Elderly clergymen in country parsonages revived the rollicking memories of their undergraduate days, and sent me academic quips of the forties and fifties. From the most various quarters I received suggestions, corrections, and enrichments which have made each edition an improvement on the last. The public notices were, on the whole, extremely kind, and some were unintentionally amusing. Thus one editor, putting two and two together, calculated that the writer could not be less than eighty years old; while another, like Mrs. Prig, "didn't believe there was no sich a person," and acutely divined that the book was a journalistic squib directed against my amiable garrulity. The most pleasing notice was that of Jean La Frette, some extracts from which I venture to append. It is true that competent judges have questioned the accuracy of M. La Frette's idiom, but his sentiments are unimpeachable. The necessary corrective was not wanting, for a weekly journal of high culture described my poor handiwork as "Snobbery and Snippets." There was a boisterousness--almost a brutality--about the phrase which deterred me from reading the review; but I am fain to admit that there was a certain rude justice in the implied criticism.
G.W.E.R.
Christmas, 1903.

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
I.
LINKS WITH THE PAST
II. LORD RUSSELL
III. LORD SHAFTESBURY
IV. CARDINAL MANNING
V. LORD HOUGHTON
VI. RELIGION AND MORALITY
VII. SOCIAL EQUALIZATION
VIII. SOCIAL AMELIORATION
IX. THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE
X. POLITICS
XI. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY
XII. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY (contd.)
XIII. CONVERSATION
XIV. CONVERSATION (continued)
XV. CONVERSATION (continued)
XVI. CONVERSATION (continued)
XVII. CLERGYMEN
XVIII. CLERGYMEN (continued)
XIX. REPARTEE
XX. TITLES
XXI. THE QUEEN'S ACCESSION
XXII. "PRINCEDOMS, VIRTUES, POWERS"
XXIII. LORD BEACONSFIELD
XXIV. FLATTERERS AND BORES
XXV. ADVERTISEMENTS
XXVI. PARODIES IN PROSE
XXVII. PARODIES IN VERSE
XXVIII. PARODIES IN VERSE (continued)
XXIX. VERBAL INFELICITIES
XXX. THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS
XXXI. CHILDREN
XXXII. LETTER-WRITING
XXXIII. OFFICIALDOM
XXXIV. AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK
INDEX.

I.
LINKS WITH THE PAST.
Of the celebrated Mrs. Disraeli her husband is reported to have said, "She is an excellent creature, but she never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans." In my walk through life I have constantly found myself among excellent creatures of this sort. The world is full of vague people, and in the average man, and still more in the average woman, the chronological sense seems to be entirely wanting. Thus, when I have occasionally stated in a mixed company that my first distinct recollection was the burning of Covent Garden Theatre, I have seen a general expression of surprised interest, and have been told, in a tone meant to be kind and complimentary, that my hearers would hardly have thought that my memory went back so far. The explanation has been that these excellent creatures had some vague notions of Rejected Addresses floating in their minds, and confounded the burning of Covent Garden Theatre in 1856 with that of Drury Lane Theatre in 1809. It was pleasant to feel that one bore one's years so well as to make the error possible.
But events, however striking, are only landmarks in memory. They are isolated and detached, and begin and end in themselves. The real interest of one's early life is in its Links with the Past, through the old people whom one has known. Though I place my first distinct recollection in 1856, I have memories more or less hazy of an earlier date.
There was an old Lady Robert Seymour, who lived in Portland Place, and died there in 1855, in her ninety-first year. Probably she is my most direct link with the past, for she carried down to the time of the Crimean War the habits and phraseology of Queen Charlotte's early Court. "Goold" of course she said for gold, and "yaller" for yellow, and "laylock" for lilac. She laid the stress on the second syllable of "balcony." She called her maid her "'ooman;" instead of sleeping at a place, she "lay" there, and when she consulted the doctor she spoke of having "used the 'potticary."
There still lives, in full possession of all her faculties, a venerable lady who can say that her husband was born at Boston when America was a British dependency. This is the widow of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, who was born in 1772, and helped to defeat Mr. Gladstone's Paper Bill in the House of Lords on his eighty-eighth birthday. He died in 1862.[1]
A conspicuous figure in my early recollections is Sir Henry Holland, M.D., father of the present Lord Knutsford. He was born in 1788, and died in 1873. The stories of his superhuman vigour and activity would fill a volume. In 1863 Bishop Wilberforce wrote to a friend abroad: "Sir Henry Holland, who got back