Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 6

your regard for your daughter's happiness will
induce you at once to give your full assent to the fulfilment of our
engagement, as you would thereby divest our marriage of all that could
possibly lessen the happiness we anticipate from it.
"I know that your principal objection to me has been on account of my
unsteadiness, and I deeply regret ever having given you cause to raise
such an objection; but I trust my conduct for some time back having
been of a very different character, will convince you that I have seen
my error. The gayety into which I have fallen may partly be ascribed to
the peculiarity of my situation; having no relations near me, no family
ties, no domestic comforts, &c., I may be the more excusable for
having kept the company of young men, but I can assure you I have
lost all inclination for the practice of such follies as I have once fallen
into, and I look to a steady, sober married life as alone calculated to
afford me happiness.
"I will wait upon you on Monday with most anxious hopes for your
favorable answer.
"I am, Dear Madam,
"Yours most respectfully,
"JOHN HAMMERTON.
"Shaw, June 1st, 1833."
The reader may be surprised by the double m in the signature. It was
my father's custom to write our name so, for a reason that will be
explained in another chapter. The letter itself is rather formal,
according to the fashion 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