Collections and Recollections | Page 2

of the book, from that time till now, would not interest the
public, but are extremely interesting to me. The book brought me many
friends. One 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