Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

Village Sports and Pastimes

It was wonderful the utter stagnation of the village. The chapel was the only centre of intellectual life; next to that was the alehouse, whither some of the conscript fathers repaired to get a sight of the county paper, to learn the state of the markets, and at times to drink more ale than was good for them. About ten I had my first experience of death. I had lost an aged grandmother, but I was young, and it made little impression on me, except the funeral sermon – preached by my father to an overflowing congregation – which still lives in my recollections of a dim and distant past. I was a small boy. I was laid up with chilblains and had to be carried into the chapel; and altogether the excitement of the occasion was pleasing rather than the reverse. But the next who fell a victim was a young girl – whom I thought beautiful – who was the daughter of a miller who attended our chapel, and with whom I was on friendly terms. On the day of her funeral her little brothers and sisters came to our house to be out of the way. But I could not play with them, as I was trying to realise the figure I thought so graceful lying in the grave – to be eaten of worms, to turn to clay. But I shuddered as I thought of what we so often say:

There are no acts of mercy past
In the cold grave to which we haste,
But darkness, death, and long despair
Reign in eternal silence there.

I was sick at heart – I am sick at heart now – as I recall the sad day, though more than seventy years have rolled over my head since then.

I have spoken of the excitement of the Reform struggle. It was to most of us a time of fear. A mob was coming from Yarmouth to attack Benacre Hall, and then what would become of Sir Thomas “Guche”? But older heads began to think that the nation would survive the blow, even if Benacre Hall were burnt and Sir Thomas “Guche” had to hide his diminished head. As it happened, we did lose Sir Thomas’s services. He was thrown out for Suffolk, and Mr. Robert Newton Shaw, a Whig, reigned in his stead. How delighted we all were! Now had come the golden age, and the millennium was at hand. Pensioners and place men were no longer to fatten on the earnings of a suffering people, Radical politicians even looked forward to the time when the parson would lose his tithes.

The villagers rarely left the village; they got work at the neighbouring farms, and if they did not, they did not do so badly under the old Poor Laws, which paid a premium to the manufacturers of large families. The cottages were miserable hovels then, as they mostly are, and charity had full scope for exercise, especially at Christmas time, when those who went to the parish church were taught the blessedness of serving God and mammon. At one time the dear old chapel would hold all the meetingers; but soon came sectarian divisions and animosities. There was a great Baptist preacher at Beccles of the name of Wright, and of a Sunday some of our people walked eight miles to hear him, and came back more sure that they were the elect than ever, and more contemptuous of the poor blinded creatures who, to use a term much in common then, sat under my father. Now and then the Ranters got hold of a barn, and then there was another secession. Perhaps we had too much theological disputation. I think we had; but then there was nothing else to think about. The people had no cheap newspapers, and if they had they could not have read them, and so they saw signs and had visions, and told how the Lord had converted them by visible manifestations of His presence and power. Well, they were happy, and they needed somewhat to make them happy amidst the abounding poverty and desolation of their lives. By means of a vehicle – called a whiskey – which was drawn by a mule or a pony, as chance might determine, the family of which I was a member occasionally visited Southwold, prettier than it is now, or Lowestoft, which had no port, merely a long row of houses climbing up to the cliff; or Beccles, then supposed to be a very genteel town, and where there was a ladies’ boarding school; or to Bungay, where John Childs, a sturdy opponent in later years of Church rates and Bible monopoly, carried on a large printing business for the London publishers, and cultivated politics and phrenology. It was a grand outing for us all. Sometimes we got as far as Halesworth, where they had a Primitive meeting-house with great pillars, behind which the sleeper might sweetly dream till the fiddles sounded and the singing commenced. But as to long journeys they were rarely taken. If one did one had to go by coach, and there was sure to be an accident. Our village doctor who, with his half-dozen daughters, attended our chapel, did once take a journey, and met with a fall that, had his skull been not so thick, might have led to a serious catastrophe. Then there was Brother Hickman, of Denton, a dear, good man who never stirred from the parish. Once in an evil hour he went a journey on a stage coach, which was upset, and the consequence was a long and dangerous illness. If home-keeping youths have ever homely wits, what homeliness of wit we must have had. But now and then great people found their way to us, such as Edward Taylor, Gresham Professor of Music, who had a little property in the village, which gave him a vote, and before the Reform Bill was carried elections were elections, and we knew it, for did not four-horse coaches at all times, with flags flowing and trumpets blowing, drive through with outvoters for Yarmouth, collected at the candidates’ expense from all parts of the kingdom? In the summer, too, we had another excitement in the shape of the fish vans – light four-wheel waggons, drawn by two horses – which raced all the way from Lowestoft or Yarmouth to London. They were built of green rails, and filled up with hampers of mackerel, to be delivered fresh on the London market. They only had one seat, and that was the driver’s. At the right time of year they were always on the road going up full, returning empty, and they travelled a good deal faster than the Royal mail. They were an ever-present danger to old topers crawling home from the village ale-house, and to dirty little boys playing marbles or making mud pies in the street. Of course, there was no policeman to clear the way. Policemen did not come into fashion till long after; but we had the gamekeeper. How I feared him as he caught me bird-nesting at an early hour in the Park, and sent me home with a heavy heart as he threatened me with Beccles gaol.

In the winter I used to go out rabbiting. A young farmer in our neighbourhood was fond of the sport, and would often take me out with him, not to participate in the sport, but simply to look on. It might be that a friend or two would bring his gun and dog, and join in the pastime, which, at any rate, had this advantage as far as I was personally concerned, that it gave me a thundering appetite. The ferrets which one of the attendants always carried in a bag had a peculiar fascination for me, with their long fur, their white, shiny teeth, their little sparkling black eyes. The ferret is popped into the hole in which the rabbit is hidden. Poor little animal, he is between the devil and the deep sea. He waits in his hole till he can stand it no longer, but there is no way of escape for him out. There are the men, with their guns and the dogs eager for the fun. Ah! it is soon over, and this is often the way of the world.

To us in that Suffolk village the sports of big schools and more ambitious lads were unknown. For us there was no cricket or football, except on rare occasions, when we had an importation of juveniles in the house, but I don’t know that we were much the better for that. We trundled the hoop, and raced one with another, and that is capital exercise. We played hopscotch, which is good training for the calves of the legs. We had bows and arrows and stilts, and in the autumn – when we could get into the fields – we built and flew kites, kites which we had to make ourselves. If there was an ancient sandpit in the neighbourhood how we loved to explore its depths, and climb its heights, and in the freshness of the early spring what a joy it was to explore the hedges, or the trees of the neighbouring park, when the gamekeepers happened to be out of sight in search of birds’ nests and eggs; and in the long winter evenings what a delight it was to read of the past, though it was in the dry pages of Rollin, or to glow over the poems of Cowper. We were, it is true, a serious family. We had family prayers. No wine but that known as gingerbeer honoured the paternal hospitable board. Grog I never saw in any shape. A bit of gingerbread and a glass of water formed our evening meal. Oh, at Christmas what games we had of snap-dragon and blind man’s buff. I always felt small when a boy from Cockneydom appeared amongst us, and that I hold to be the chief drawback of such a bringing up as ours was. The battle of life is best fought by the cheeky. It does not do to be too humble and retiring. Baron Trench owned to a too great consciousness of innate worth. It gave him, he writes, a too great degree of pride. That is bad, but not so bad as the reverse – that feeling of humility which withers up all the noblest aspirations of the soul, and which I possessed partly from religion, and partly from the feeling that, as a Dissenter, I was a social Pariah in the eyes of the generation around. My modesty, I own, has been in my way all through life. The world takes a man at his own valuation. It is too busy to examine each particular claim, and the prize is won by him who most loudly and pertinaciously blows his own trumpet. At any rate, in our Suffolk home we enjoyed

Lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day – the easy night —
The spirits pure – the slumbers light —
That fly the approach of morn.

The one drawback was the long-drawn darkness of the winter night. I slept in an old attic in an old house, where every creak on the stairs, when the wind was roaring all round, gave me a stroke of pain, and where ghastly faces came to me in the dark of old women haggard and hideous and woebegone. De Quincy hints in his numerous writings at boyish times of a similar kind. I fancy most of us in boyhood are tortured in a similar way. Fuseli supped on pork chops to procure fitting subjects for his weird sketches. But we never had pork chops; yet in the visions of the night what awful faces I saw – almost enough to turn one’s brain and to make one’s hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

Country villages are always fifty years behind the times, and so it was with us. In the farmyard there was no steam engine, and all the work was done by manual labour, such as threshing the corn with the flail. In many families the only light was that of the rushlight, often home made. Lucifer matches were unknown, and we had to get a light by means of a flint and tinder, which ignited the brimstone match, always in readiness. Cheap ready-made clothes were unknown, and the poor mother had a good deal of tailoring to do. In the cottage there was little to read save the cheap publications of the Religious Tract Society, and the voluminous writings of the excellent Hannah More, teaching the lower orders to fear God and honour the king, and not to meddle with those that were given to change. Her “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife” was the only novel that ever found its way into religious circles – with the exception of “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and that was awfully illustrated. Anybody who talked of the rights of man at that time was little better than one of the wicked. One of Hannah More’s characters, Mr. Fantom, is thus described: – “He prated about narrowness and ignorance (the derisive italics are Hannah’s own), and bigotry and prejudice and priestcraft on the one hand, and on the other of public good, the love of mankind, and liberality and candour, and above all of benevolence.” Dear Hannah made her hero, of course, come to a shocking end, and so does his servant William, who as he lies in Chelmsford gaol to be hung for murder confesses, “I was bred up in the fear of God, and lived with credit in many sober families in which I was a faithful servant, till, being tempted by a little higher wages, I left a good place to go and live with Mr. Fantom, who, however, never made good his fine promises, but proved a hard master.” Another of Hannah’s characters was a Miss Simpson, a clergyman’s daughter, who is always exclaiming, “’Tis all for the best,” though she ends her days in a workhouse, while the man through whose persecution she comes to grief dies in agony, bequeathing her £100 as compensation for his injustice, and declares that if he could live his life over again he would serve God and keep the Sabbath. And such was the literature which was to stop reform, and make the poor contented with their bitter lot!

But the seed, such as it was, often fell on stony soil. The labourers became discontented, and began more and more to feel that it was not always true that all was for the best, as their masters told them. They were wretchedly clad, and lodged, and fed. Science, sanitary or otherwise, was quite overlooked then. The parson and the squire took no note of them, except when they heard that they went to the Baptist, or Independent, or Methodist chapel, when great was their anger and dire their threats. Again Hannah More took the field “to improve the habits and raise the principles of the common people at a time when their dangers and temptations – social and political – were multiplied beyond the example of any former period. The inferior ranks were learning to read, and they preferred to read the corrupt and inflammatory publications which the French Revolution had called into existence.” Alas! all was in vain. Rachel, weeping for her children who had been torn from her to die in foreign lands, fighting to keep up the Holy Alliance and the right divine of kings to govern wrong, or had toiled and moiled in winter’s cold and summer’s heat, merely to end their days in the parish workhouse, refused to be comforted. Good people grew alarmed, and goody tracts were circulated more than ever. The edifying history of the “Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” was to be seen in many a cottage in our village. The shepherd earned a shilling a day; he lived in a wretched cottage which had a hole in the thatch which made his poor wife a martyr to rheumatism in consequence of the rain coming through. He had eight children to keep, chiefly on potatoes and salt, but he was happy because he was pious and contented. A gentleman says to him, “How do you support yourself under the pressure of actual want? Is not hunger a great weakener of your faith?” “Sir,” replied the shepherd, “I live upon the promises.” Yes, that was the kind of teaching in our village and all over England, and the villagers got tired of it, and took to firing stacks and barns, and actually in towns were heard to cry “More pay and less parsons.” What was the world coming to? said dear old ladies. It was well Hannah More had died and thus been saved from the evil to come. The Evangelicals were at their wits’ end. They wanted people to think of the life to come, while the people preferred to think of the life that was – of this world rather than the next.

I am sure that in our village we had too much religion. I write this seriously and after thinking deeply on the matter. A man has a body to be cared for, as well as a soul to be saved or damned. Charles Kingsley was the first to tell us that it was vain to preach to people with empty stomachs. But when I was a lad preaching was the cure for every ill, and the more wretched the villagers became the more they were preached to. There was little hope of any one who did not go to some chapel or other. There was little help for any one who preferred to talk of his wrongs or to claim his rights. I must own that the rustic worshipper was a better man in all the relationships of life – as servant, as husband, as father, as friend – than the rustic unbeliever. It astonished me not a little to talk with the former, and to witness his copiousness of Scripture phraseology and the fluency of his religious talk. He was on a higher platform. He had felt what Burke wrote when he tells us that religion was for the man in humble life, to raise his nature and to put him in mind of a State in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature and more than equal by virtue. Alas! we had soon Lord Brougham’s beershops, and there was a sad falling away. Poachers and drunkards increased on every side. All around there seemed to be nothing but poverty, with the exception of the farmers – then, as now, always grumbling, but apparently living well and enjoying life.

As one thinks of the old country years ago one can realise the truth of the story told by the late Mr. Fitzgerald of a Suffolk village church one winter’s evening: —

Congregation, with the Old Hundredth ready for the parson’s dismissal words.

Good Old Parson (not at all meaning rhymes): The light has grown so very dim I scarce can see to read the hymn.

Congregation (taking it up to the first half of the Old Hundredth):

The light has grown so very dim,
I scarce can see to read the hymn.

    (Pause as usual.)

Parson (mildly impatient): I did not mean to sing a hymn, I only meant my eyes were dim.

Congregation (to second part of the Old Hundredth):

I did not mean to read a hymn,
I only meant my eyes were dim.

Parson (out of patience): I did not mean a hymn at all, I think the devil’s in you all.

Curious were the ways of the East Anglian clergy. One of our neighbouring parsons had his clerk give out notice that on the next Sunday there would be no service “because master was going to Newmarket.” No one cared for the people, unless it was the woman preacher or Methodist parson, and the people were ignorant beyond belief. Few could either read or write. It was rather amusing to hear them talk. A boy was called bow, a girl was termed a mawther, and if milk or beer was wanted it was generally fetched in a gotch.

Our home life was simple enough. We went early to bed and were up with the lark. I was arrayed in a pinafore and wore a frill – which I abhorred – and took but little pleasure in my personal appearance – a very great mistake, happily avoided by the present generation. We children had each a little bed of garden ground which we cultivated to the best of our power. Ours was really a case of plain living and high thinking. Of an evening the room was dimly lighted by means of a dip candle which constantly required snuffing. To write with we had the ordinary goose-quill. The room, rarely used, in which we received company was called the parlour. Goloshes had not then come into use, and women wore in muddy weather pattens or clogs. The simple necessaries of life were very dear, and tea and coffee and sugar were sold at what would now be deemed an exorbitant price. Postage was prohibitory, and when any one went to town he was laden with letters. As little light as possible was admitted into the house in order to save the window-tax. The farmer was generally arrayed in a blue coat and yellow brass buttons. The gentleman had a frilled shirt and wore Hessian boots. I never saw a magazine of the fashions; nowadays they are to be met with everywhere. Yet we were never dull, and in the circle in which I moved we never heard of the need of change. People were content to live and die in the village without going half-a-dozen miles away, with the exception of the farmers, who might drive to the nearest market town, transact their business, dine at the ordinary, and then, after a smoke and a glass of brandy and water and a chat with their fellow-farmers, return home. Of the rush and roar of modern life, with its restlessness and eagerness for something new and sensational, we had not the remotest idea.

CHAPTER V.

Out on the World

In the good old city of Norwich. I passed a year as an apprentice, in what was then known as London Lane. It was a time of real growth to me mentally. I had a bedroom to myself; in reality it was a closet. I had access to a cheap library, where I was enabled to take my fill, and did a good deal of miscellaneous study. I would have joined the Mechanics’ Institute, where they had debates, but the people with whom I lived were orthodox Dissenters, and were rather afraid of my embracing Unitarian principles. The fear was, I think, groundless. At any rate, one of the most distinguished debaters was Mr. Jacob Henry Tillett, afterwards M.P., then in a lawyer’s office; and another was his friend Joseph Pigg, who became a Congregational minister, but did not live to old age. Another of the lot – who was a great friend of Pigg’s – was Bolingbroke Woodward, who was, I think, in a bank, from which he went to Highbury, thence as a Congregational minister to Wortwell, near Harleston, and died librarian to the Queen. Evidently there was no necessary connection, as the people where I lived thought, between debating and embracing Unitarian principles.

Norwich seemed to me a wonderful city. I had already visited the place at the time when it celebrated the passing of the Reform Bill, when there was by day a grand procession, and a grand dinner in the open air; where a friend, who knew what boys liked, gave me a slice of plum pudding served up on the occasion; and then in the evening there were fireworks, the first I had ever seen, on the Castle Hill. It was a long ride from our village, and we had to travel by the carrier’s cart, drawn by two horses, and sit beneath the roof on the top of the luggage and baggage, for we stopped everywhere to pick up parcels. The passengers when seated endeavoured to make themselves as comfortable as circumstances would allow. Norwich at that time had a literary reputation, and it seemed to me there were giants in the land in those days. One I remember was the Rev. John Kinghorn, a great light among the Baptists, and whom, with his spare figure and primitive costume, I always confounded with John the Baptist. Another distinguished personage was William Youngman, at whose house my father spent a good deal of time, engaged in the hot disputation in which that grand old Norwich worthy always delighted. As a boy, I remember I trembled as the discussion went on, for

Mr. MacWinter was apt to be hot,
And Mr. McKenzie a temper had got.

Yet their friendship continued in spite of difference of opinion, and well do I remember him in his square pew in the Old Meeting, as, with his gold-headed cane firmly grasped, the red-faced fat old man sat as solemn and passionless as a judge, while in the pulpit before him the Rev. Mr. Innes preached. But, alas! the parson had a pretty daughter, and I lost all his sermon watching the lovely figure in the pew just by. Another of the deacons, tall and stiff as a poker, Mr. Brightwell, had a pew just behind, father of a young lady known later as a successful authoress, while from the gallery opposite a worthy man, Mr. Blunderfield, gave out the hymn. Up in the galleries there were Spelmans and Jarrolds in abundance, while in a pew behind the latter was seated a lad who in after life attained, and still retains, some fame as a lecturer against Christianity, and later in its favour, well known as Dr. Sexton. To that Old Meeting I always went with indescribable awe; its square pews, its old walls with their memorial marbles, the severity of the aspect of the worshippers, the antique preacher in the antique pulpit all affected me. But I loved the place nevertheless. Even now I am thrilled as I recall the impressive way in which Mr. Blunderfield gave out the hymns, and I can still remember one of Mr. Innes’ texts, and it was always a matter of pride to me when Mr. Youngman took me home to dinner and to walk on his lawn, which sloped down to the river, and to view with wonder the peacock which adorned his grounds. The family with which I was apprenticed attended on the ministry of the Rev. John Alexander, a man deservedly esteemed by all and beloved by his people. He was a touching preacher, an inimitable companion, and was hailed all over East Anglia as its Congregational bishop, a position I fancy still held by his successor, the Rev. Dr. Barrett. Dissent in Norwich seemed to me much more respected than in my village home. Dr. Brock, then plain Mr. Brock, also came to Norwich when I was there, and had a fine congregation in St. Mary’s, which seemed to me a wonderfully fine chapel. I was always glad to go there. Once I made my way to the Octagon, a still nobler building, but my visit was found out by my master’s wife, and henceforth I was orthodox, that is as long as I was at Norwich. The Norwich of that time, though the old air of depression, in consequence of declining manufacture, has given place to a livelier tone, in its essential features remains the same. There are still the Castle and the old landmarks of the Cathedral and the Market Place. The great innovation has been the Great Eastern Railway, which has given to it a new and handsome quarter, and the Colman mustard mills. Outside the city, in the suburbs, of course, Norwich has much increased, and we have now crowded streets or trim semidetached villas, where in my time were green fields or rustic walks. London did not dominate the country as it does now, and Norwich was held to be in some quarters almost a second Athens. There lived there a learned man of the name of Wilkins, with whom I, alas! never came into contact, who had much to do with resuscitating the fame of the worthy Norwich physician, Sir Thomas Browne, immortal, by reason of his “Religio Medici” and “Urn Burial,” especially the latter. The Martineaus and the Taylors lived there. Johnson Fox – the far-famed Norwich weaver boy of the Anti-Corn League, and Unitarian minister, and subsequently M.P. for Oldham – had been a member of the Old Meeting, whence he had been sent to Homerton College to study for the ministry, and a sister and brother, if I remember aright, still attended at the Old Meeting. When I was a lad there still might be seen in the streets of Norwich the venerable figure of William Taylor, who had first opened up German literature to the intelligent public; and there had not long died Mrs. Taylor, the friend of Sir James Mackintosh and other distinguished personages. “She was the wife,” writes Basil Montagu, “of a shopkeeper in that city; mild and unassuming, quiet and meek, sitting amidst her large family, always occupied with her needle and domestic occupations, but always assisting, by her great knowledge, the advancement of kind and dignified sentiment. Manly wisdom and feminine gentleness were united in her with such attractive manners that she was universally loved and respected. In high thoughts and gentle deeds she greatly resembled the admirable Lucy Hutchinson, and in troubled times would have been specially distinguished for firmness in what she thought right.” Dr. Sayers was also one of the stars of the Norwich literary circle, and I recollect Mrs. Opie, who had given up the world of fashion and frivolity, had donned the Quaker dress, and at whose funeral in the Quaker Meeting-house I was present. The Quakers were at that time a power in Norwich, and John Joseph Gurney, of Earlham, close by, enjoyed quite a European reputation. It was not long that Harriet Martineau had turned her back on the Norwich of her youth. The house where she was born was in a court in Magdalen Street. But it never was her dwelling-place after her removal from it when she was three months old. Harriet was given to underrating everybody who had any sort of reputation, and she certainly underrated Norwich society, which, when I was a lad, was superior to most of our county towns. I caught now and then a few faint echoes of that world into which I was forbidden to enter. Norwich ministers were yet learned, and their people were studious. A dear old city was Norwich, with much to interest a raw lad from the country, with its Cathedral, which, as too often is the case, sadly interfered with the free life of all within its reach, with its grand Market Place filled on a Saturday with the country farmers’ wives, who had come to sell the produce of their dairy and orchard and chickenyard, and who returned laden with their purchases in the way of grocery and drapery; and its Castle set upon a hill. It was there that for the first time I saw judges in ermine and crimson, and learned to realise the majesty of the law. Then there was an immense dragon kept in St. Andrew’s Hall, and it was a wonder to all as he was dragged forth from his retirement, and made the rounds of the streets with his red eyes, his green scales, his awful tail. I know not whether that old dragon still survives. I fear the Reformers, who were needlessly active in such matters, abolished him. But the sight of sights I saw during my short residence at Norwich was that of the chairing of the M.P.’s. I forget who they were; I remember they had red faces, gorgeous dresses, and silk stockings. Norwich was a corrupt place, and a large number of electors were to be bought, and unless they were bought no M.P. had a chance of being returned. The consequence was party feeling ran very high, and the defeated party were usually angry, as they were sure to contend that they had been beaten not by honest voting, but by means of bribery and corruption, and thus when the chairing took place there was often not a little rioting, and voters inflamed with beer were always ready for a row. The fortunate M.P.’s thus on chairing days were exposed to not a little danger. The chairs in which they were seated, adorned with the colours of the party, were borne by strapping fellows quite able to defend themselves, and every now and then ready to give a heave somewhat dangerous to the seat-holder, who all the time had to preserve a smiling face and bow to the ladies who lined the windows of the street through which the procession passed, and to look as if he liked it rather than not. The sight, however, I fancy, afforded more amusement to the spectators than to the M.P.’s, who were glad when it was over, and who had indeed every right to be, for there was always the chance of a collision with a hostile mob, and a dénouement anything but agreeable. But, perhaps, the sight of sights was Norwich Market on Christmas Day, and the Norwich coaches starting for London crammed with turkeys outside and in, and only leaving room for the driver and the guard. At that time London was chiefly supplied with its turkeys from Norfolk, and it was only by means of stage coaches that the popular poultry could be conveyed. In this respect Norwich has suffered, for London now draws its Christmas supplies from all the Continent. It was not so when I was a lad, but from all I can hear Norwich Market Place the Saturday before Christmas is as largely patronised as ever, and they tell me, though, alas, I have no practical knowledge of the fact, the Norwich turkeys are as good as ever. As long as they remain so Norwich has little to fear. I have also at a later time a faint recollection of good port, but now I am suffering from gout, and we never mention it. In these teetotal days “our lips are now forbidden to speak that once familiar word.”

CHAPTER VI.

At College

What more natural than that a son should wish to follow in his father’s steps? I had a minister for a father. It was resolved that I should become one. In Dissenting circles no one was supposed to enter the ministry until he had got what was denominated a call. I persuaded myself that I had such a call, though I much doubt it now. I tried to feel that I was fitted for this sacred post – I who knew nothing of my own heart, and was as ignorant of the world as a babe unborn. I was sent to a London college, now no more, and had to be examined for my qualifications by four dear old fossils, and was, of course, admitted. I passed because my orthodoxy was unimpeachable, and I was to preach – I, who trembled at the sound of my own voice, who stood in terror of deacons, and who had never attempted to make a speech. I hope at our colleges they manage these things better now, and select men who can show that the ministry is in them before they seek to enter the ministry. As it was, I found more than one of my fellow-students was utterly destitute of all qualifications for the pastorate, and was simply wasting the splendid opportunities placed within his reach. The routine of college life was not unpleasant. We rose early, attended lectures from our principal and the classes at University College, and took part in conducting family service in the hall. Occasionally we preached in the College chapel, the principal attendant at which was an old tailor, who thereby secured a good deal of the patronage of the students. By attending the classes at University College we had opportunities of which, alas! only a minority made much use. They who did so became distinguished in after life, such as Rev. Joseph Mullens, Secretary of the London Missionary Society; and John Curwen, who did so much for congregational singing; Dr. Newth, and Philip Smith, who was tutor at Cheshunt, and afterwards Headmaster at Mill Hill. Nor must I forget Rev. Andrew Reed, a preacher always popular, partly on his own and partly on his father’s account; nor Thomas Durrant Philip, the son of the well-known doctor whose splendid work among the Hottentots is not yet forgotten; nor Dr. Edkins, the great Chinese scholar; nor the late Dr. Henry Robert Reynolds, who won for Cheshunt a world-wide reputation. As regards myself, I fear I took more interest in the debates at University College, where I made acquaintance with men with whose names the world has since become familiar, such as Sir James Stansfeld, Peter Taylor, M.P. for Leicester, Professor Waley, of Jewish persuasion, C. J. Hargreaves, Baron of the Encumbered Estates Court, and others who seemed to me far superior to most of my fellow-students training for the Christian ministry. I was much interested in the English Literature Class under the late Dr. Gordon Latham, the great Anglo-Saxon scholar, who would fain have had me Professor in his place.

I cannot say that I look back with much pleasure on my college career. We had two heads, neither of whom had any influence with the students, nor did it seem to me desirable that they should. One of them was an easy, pleasant, gentlemanly man, who was pleased to remark on an essay which I read before him on Christianity, and which was greeted with a round of applause by my fellow-students, that it displayed a low tone of religious feeling. Poor man, he did not long survive after that. The only bit of advice I had from his successor was as to the propriety of closing my eyes as if in prayer whenever I went into the pulpit to preach, on the plea, not that by means of it my heart might be solemnised and elevated for the ensuing service, but that it would have a beneficial effect on the people – that, in fact, on account of it they would think all the better of me! After that, you may be sure I got little benefit from anything the good man might feel fit to say. As a scholar he was nowhere. All that I recollect of him was that he gave us D’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation in driblets as if we were rather a superior class of Sunday scholars. Mr. Stowell Brown tells us that he did not perceive that the members of his church were in any respect better than those who were hearers alone. And to me something similar was manifested in college. We pious students were not much better than other young men. It seemed to me that we were a little more lazy and flabby, that was all. As a rule, few of us broke down morally, though such cases were by no means rare. I cannot say, as M. Renan did, that there was never a breath of scandal with respect to his fellow-students in his Romanist Academy; but the class of young men who had come to study for the ministry was not, with very rare exceptions, of a high order, either in a religious or intellectual point of view. In this respect I believe there has been a great improvement of late.

My pulpit career was short. At times I believe I preached with much satisfaction to my hearers; at other times very much the reverse. De Foe writes: “It was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart from, the honour of that sacred employ.” My experience was something similar. I never had a call to a charge, nor did I go the right way to work to get one. I felt that I could gladly give it up, and yet how could I do so? I had a father whom I fondly loved, who had set his heart on seeing me follow in his honoured steps. I was what they called a child of many prayers. How could I do otherwise than work for their fulfilment? And if I gave up all thought of the ministry, how was I to earn my daily bread? At length, however, I drifted away from the pulpit and religious life for a time. I was not happy, but I was happier than when vainly seeking to pursue an impossible career. I know more of the world now. I have more measured myself with my fellows. I see what ordinary men and women are, and the result is – fortunately or not, I cannot tell – that I have now a better conceit of myself. I often wish some one would ask me to occupy a pulpit now. How grand the position! how mighty the power! You are out of the world – in direct contact with the living God, speaking His Word, doing His work. There in the pew are souls aching to be lifted out of themselves; to get out of the mud and mire of the world and of daily life; to enter within the veil, as it were; to abide in the secret place of the Most High. It is yours to aid them. There are those dead in trespasses and sins; it is yours to rouse them. There are the aged to be consoled; the young to be won over. Can there be a nobler life than that which makes a man an ambassador from God to man?

Yet they were pleasant years I spent at Coward College, Torrington Square, supported by the liberality of an old wealthy merchant of that name, the friend of Dr. Doddridge, and at Wymondley – to which Doddridge’s Academy, as it was termed, was subsequently moved – where were trained, at any rate, two of our most distinguished Nonconformists, Edward Miall and Thomas Binney. I am sorry Coward College ceased to exist as a separate institution. We were all very happy there. We had a splendid old library at our disposal, where we could learn somewhat of

Many an old philosophy
On Argus heights divinely sung;

and for many a day afterwards we dined together once a year. I think our last dinner was at Mr. Binney’s, who was at his best when he gathered around him his juniors, like himself, the subjects of old Coward’s bounty. It was curious to me to find how little appreciated was the good merchant’s grand bequest. I often found that in many quarters, especially among the country churches, the education given to the young men at Coward’s was regarded as a disqualification. It was suspected that it impeded their religious career, that they were not so sound as good young men who did not enjoy these advantages, that at other colleges the preachers were better because not so learned, more devotedly pious because more ignorant. It was held then that a student might be over-educated, and the more he knew the more his religious zeal diminished. In these days the feeling has ceased to exist, and the churches are proud of the men who consecrate to the service of their Lord all their cultivated powers of body and mind. The Christian Church has ceased to fear the bugbear of a learned ministry. One can quite understand, however, how that feeling came into existence. The success of the early Methodists had led many to feel how little need there was for culture when the torpor of the worldly and the poor was to be broken up. The Methodists were of the people and spoke to them in a language they could understand. Learning, criticism, doubt – what were they in the opinion of the pious of those days but snares to be avoided, perils to be shunned? For good or bad, we have outgrown that.

CHAPTER VII.

London Long Ago

In due time – that is when I was about sixteen years old – I made my way to London, a city as deadly, as dreary as can well be conceived, in spite of the wonderful Cathedral of St. Paul’s, as much a thing of beauty as it ever was, and the Monument, one of the first things the country cousin was taken to see, with the exception of Madame Tussaud’s, then in Baker Street. In the streets where the shops were the houses were mean and low, of dirty red brick, of which the houses in the more aristocratic streets and squares were composed. Belgravia, with its grand houses, was never dreamt of. The hotels were of the stuffiest character; some of them had galleries all round for the sleeping chambers, which, however, as often as not were over the stables, where the coach horses were left to rest after the last gallop into London, and to be ready for the early start at five or six in the morning. Perhaps at that time the best way of coming into London was sailing up the Thames. As there were few steamers then the number of ships of all kinds was much greater than at present, when a steamer comes up with unerring regularity, discharges her cargo, takes in a fresh one, and is off again without a moment’s delay. You saw Greenwich Hospital, as beautiful then as now, the big docks with the foreign produce, the miles of black colliers in the Pool, the Tower of London, the Customs House, and Billingsgate, a very inconvenient hole, more famed for classic language then than now. Yet it was always a pleasure to be landed in the city after sitting all day long on the top of a stage coach. In many ways the railway was but a poor improvement on the stage coach. In the first place you could see the country better; in the second place the chances were you had better company, at any rate people talked more, and were more inclined to be agreeable; and the third place, in case of an accident, you felt yourself safer. As an old Jehu said, contrasting the chances, “If you have an accident on a coach there you are, but if you are in a railway carriage where are you!” And some of the approaches to London were almost dazzling. Of a winter’s night it was quite a treat to come into town by the East Anglian coaches, and to see the glare of the Whitechapel butchers’ shops all lit up with gas, and redolent of beef and mutton. It was wonderful in the eyes of the young man from the country.

The one great improvement in London was Regent Street, from Portland Place and Regent’s Park to the statue an infatuated people erected to a shady Duke of York in Trafalgar Square. Just by there was the National Gallery, at any rate in a situation easy of access. Right past the Mansion House a new street had been made to London Bridge, and there the half-cracked King William was honoured by a statue, which was supposed to represent the Royal body and the Royal head. In Cornhill there was an old-fashioned building known as the Royal Exchange, which kept alive the memory of the great civic benefactor, Sir Thomas Gresham, and the maiden Queen; but everywhere the streets were narrow and the houses mean. Holborn Hill led to a deep valley, on one side of which ran a lane filled with pickpockets, and cut-throats and ruffians of all kinds, into which it was not safe for any one to enter. And as you climbed the hill you came to Newgate Market, along which locomotion was almost impossible all the early morning, as there came from the north and the south and the east and the west all the suburban butchers for their daily supply. Just over the way on the left was that horror of horrors, Smithfield, where on a market day some thousands of oxen and sheep by unheard of brutality had been penned up, waiting to be purchased and let loose mad with hunger and thirst and fright and pain all over the narrow streets of the city, to the danger of pedestrians, especially such as were old and feeble. Happily, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was close by, and the sufferer had perhaps a chance of life. The guardians of the streets were the new police, the Peelers or the Bobbies as they were sarcastically called. The idiotic public did not think much of them; they were the thin edge of the wedge, their aim was to destroy the glorious liberty of every man, to do all the mischief they could, and to enslave the people. Was not Sir Robert Peel a Tory of the Tories and the friend of Wellington, so beloved by the people that he had to guard his house with iron shutters? At that time the public was rather badly off for heroes, with the exception of Orator Hunt, who got into Parliament and collapsed, as most of the men of the people did. Yet I was a Liberal – as almost all Dissenters were with the exception of the wealthy who attended at the Poultry or at Walworth, where John and George Clayton preached.

In the City life was unbearable by reason of the awful noise of the stone-paven streets, now happily superseded by asphalte. Papers were dear, but in all parts of London there were old-fashioned coffee and chop houses where you could have a dinner at a reasonable price and read the newspapers and magazines. Peele’s, in Fleet Street, at the corner of Fetter Lane, was a great place for newspapers and reporters and special correspondents. Many a newspaper article have I written there. Then there were no clubs, or hardly any, and such places as the Cheshire Cheese, with its memories of old Dr. Johnson, did a roaring trade far into the night. There was a twopenny post for London, but elsewhere the charge for letters was exorbitant and prohibitory. Vice had more opportunities than now. There was no early closing, and in the Haymarket and in Drury Lane these places were frequented by prostitutes and their victims all night long. A favourite place for men to sup at was Evans’s in Covent Garden, the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane, and the Coal Hole in the Strand. The songs were of the coarsest, and the company, consisting of lords and touts, medical students, swell mobsmen, and fast men from the City, not much better. At such places decency was unknown, and yet how patronised they were, especially at Christmas time, when the country farmer stole away from home, ostensibly to see the Fat Cattle Show, then held in Baker Street. Of course there were no underground railways, and the travelling public had to put up with omnibuses and cabs, dearer, more like hearses than they are now.

I should be sorry to recommend any one to read the novels of Fielding or of Smollet. And yet in one sense they are useful. At any rate, they show how much the England of to-day is in advance of the England of 150 years ago. For instance, take London. It is held that London is in a bad way in spite of its reforming County Council. It is clear from the perusal of Smollet’s novels that a purifying process has long been at work with regard to London, and that if our County Councillors do their duty as their progenitors have done, little will remain to be done to make the metropolis a model city. “Humphry Clinker” appeared in 1771. It contains the adventures of a worthy Welsh Squire, Matthew Bramble, who in the course of his travels with his family finds himself in London. The old Squire is astonished at its size. “What I left open fields, producing corn and hay, I now find covered with streets and squares, and palaces and churches. I am credibly informed that in the space of seven years 11,000 new houses have been built in one quarter of Westminster, exclusive of what is daily added to other parts of this metropolis. Pimlico is almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington, and if this infatuation continues for half-a-century, I suppose, the whole county of Middlesex will be covered with brick.” A prophecy that has almost come to pass in our time. At that time London contained one-sixth of the entire population of the kingdom. “No wonder,” he writes, “that our villages are depopulated and our farms in want of day labourers. The villagers come up to London in the hopes of getting into service where they can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes. Disappointed in this respect, they become thieves and sharpers, and London being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places as well as prey.” The old Squire’s complaint is to be heard every day when we think or speak or write of the great metropolis.