Collections and Recollections | Page 4

to say that I am that man's daughter."
Sir Moses Montefiore was born in 1784, and died in 1885. It is a
disheartening fact for the teetotallers that he had drunk a bottle of port
wine every day since he grew up. He had dined with Lord Nelson on
board his ship, and vividly remembered the transcendent beauty of
Lady Hamilton. The last time Sir Moses appeared in public was, if I
mistake not, at a garden-party at Marlborough House. The party was
given on a Saturday. Sir Moses was restrained by religious scruples
from using his horses, and was of course too feeble to walk, so he was
conveyed to the party in a magnificent sedan-chair. That was the only
occasion on which I have seen such an article in use.
When I began to go out in London, a conspicuous figure in
dinner-society and on Protestant platforms was Captain Francis Maude,
R.N. He was born in 1798 and died in 1886. He used to say, "My
grandfather was nine years old when Charles II. died." And so, if
pedigrees may be trusted, he was. Charles II. died in 1685. Sir Robert
Maude was born in 1676. His son, the first Lord Hawarden, was born in
1727, and Captain Francis Maude was this Lord Hawarden's youngest
son. The year of his death (1880) saw also that of a truly venerable
woman, Mrs. Hodgson, mother of Kirkman and Stewart Hodgson, the
well-known partners in Barings' house. Her age was not precisely
known, but when a schoolgirl in Paris she had seen Robespierre
executed, and distinctly recollected the appearance of his bandaged
face. Her granddaughters, Mr. Stewart Hodgson's children, are quite
young women, and if they live to the age which, with such ancestry,
they are entitled to anticipate, they will carry down into the middle of
the twentieth century the account, derived from an eye-witness, of the
central event of the French Revolution.

One year later, in 1887, there died, at her house in St. James's Square,
Mrs. Anne Penelope Hoare, mother of the late Sir Henry Hoare, M.P.
She recollected being at a children's party when the lady of the house
came in and stopped the dancing because news had come that the King
of France had been put to death. Her range of conscious knowledge
extended from the execution of Louis XVI. to the Jubilee of Queen
Victoria. So short a thing is history.
Sir Walter Stirling, who was born in 1802 and died in 1888, was a little
old gentleman of ubiquitous activity, running about London with a
yellow wig, short trousers, and a cotton umbrella. I well remember his
saying to me, when Mr. Bradlaugh was committed to the Clock Tower,
"I don't like this. I am afraid it will mean mischief. I am old enough to
remember seeing Sir Francis Burdett taken to the Tower by the
Sergeant-at-Arms with a military force. I saw the riot then, and I am
afraid I shall see a riot again."
In the same year (1888) died Mrs. Thomson Hankey, wife of a former
M.P. for Peterborough. Her father, a Mr. Alexander, was born in 1729,
and she had inherited from him traditions of London as it appeared to a
young Scotsman in the year of the decapitation of the rebels after the
rising of 1745.
One of the most venerable and interesting figures in London, down to
his death in 1891, was George Thomas, sixth Earl of Albemarle. He
was born in 1799. He had played bat-trap-and-ball at St. Anne's Hill
with Mr. Fox, and, excepting his old comrade General Whichcote, who
outlived him by a few months, was the last survivor of Waterloo. A
man whom I knew longer and more intimately than any of those whom
I have described was the late Lord Charles James Fox Russell. He was
born in 1807, and died in 1894. His father's groom had led the uproar of
London servants which in the eighteenth century damned the play High
Life Below Stairs. He remembered a Highlander who had followed the
army of Prince Charles Edward in 1745, and had learned from another
Highlander the Jacobite soldiers' song--
"I would I were at Manchester, A-sitting on the grass, And by my side a
bottle of wine, And on my lap a lass."

He had officiated as a page at the coronation of George IV.; had
conversed with Sir Walter Scott about The Bride of Lammermoor
before its authorship was disclosed; had served in the Blues under
Ernest Duke of Cumberland; and had lost his way in trying to find the
newly developed quarter of London called Belgrave Square.
Among living[2] links, I hope it is not ungallant to enumerate Lady
Georgiana Grey, only surviving child of
"That Earl, who forced his compeers to