Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 6

of the time, but I think it is a good letter in its way, and believe it to have been perfectly sincere. No doubt my father fully intended to reform his way of life, but it is easier to make a good resolution than to adhere to it. I do not know enough of the degree of excess to which his love of pleasure led him, to be able to describe his life as a young man accurately, but as my mother had been well brought up and was a refined person for her rank in society, I conclude that she would not have encouraged a notorious evil-liver. Those who knew my father in his early manhood have told me that he was very popular, and yet at the same time that he bore himself with considerable dignity, one old lady going so far as to say that when he walked through the main street at Shaw, it seemed as if all the town belonged to him. It is difficult for us to understand quite accurately the social code of the Georgian era, when a man might indulge in pleasures which seem to us coarse and degrading, and yet retain all the pride and all the bearing of a gentleman.
The marriage took place according to the fixed resolution of the contracting parties, and their life together was immensely happy during the short time that it lasted. Most unfortunately it came to an end after little more than one year by my mother's lamentably premature death. I happen to possess a letter from my father's sister to her sister Anne in which she gives an account of this event, and print it because it conveys the reality more vividly than a narrative at second hand. The reader will pardon the reference to myself. It matters nothing to a dead man--as I shall be when this page is printed--whether at the age of fourteen days he was considered a fine-looking child or a weakling.
"_Friday Morning._
"MY DEAR ANNE,--You will not calculate upon so speedy an answer as this to your long and welcome epistle, nor will you calculate upon the melancholy intelligence I have to communicate. Poor John's wife, certainly the most amiable of all woman-kind, departed this life at twenty minutes past eleven last night. Her recovery from her confinement was very wonderful, we thought, but alas! it was a false one. The Drs. Whitaker of Shaw, Wood of Rochdale, and Bardsley of Manchester all agree in opinion that she has died of mere weakness without any absolute disease. She has been very delicate for a long time. Poor dear John--if I were quite indifferent to him I should grieve to see his agonies--he says at sixty it might have happened in the common course of things and he would have borne it better, but at twenty-nine, just when he is beginning life, his sad bereavement does indeed seem untimely. It is a sore affliction to him, sent for some good, and may he understand and apply it with wisdom! They had, to be sure, hardly been married long enough to quarrel, but I never saw a couple so intent on making each other happy; they had not a thought of each other but what tended to please. The poor little boy is a very fine one, and I hope he will be reared, though it often happens that when the mother is consumptive the baby dies. I do hope when John is able to look after his office a little that the occupation of his mind will give him calm. He walks from room to room, and if I meet him and he is able to articulate at all, he says, 'Ah! where must I be? what must I do?' He says nobody had such a wife, and I do think nobody ever had. He wanted me not to write till arrangements were made about the funeral. I thought you would be sorry to be informed late upon a subject so near John's heart, and that it was too late for Mr. Hinde [Footnote: The Rev. Thomas Hinde, Vicar of Featherstone, brother-in-law of the writer of the letter.] to come to the funeral. I have really nothing to say except that our poor sister was so tolerable on Wednesday morning that I went with the Milnes of Park House to Henton Park races, which I liked very well, but as things have turned out I heartily repent going. Ann was, we hoped, positively recovering on Monday and Tuesday, but it seems to have been a lightening before death. She was a very long time in the agonies of death, but seemed to suffer very little. Our afflicted brother joins me in best love to you and your dear children. Kind compliments