"DEAR BRIMLEY,

Nature's Melodrama.

TO GEORGE BRIMLEY, Esq.

EVERSLEY, 1857.

43

"Your letter has much comforted me; for your disapproval is really to me a serious thing, from what I know of your critical powers; while my own hopeless inability to judge of the goodness or badness of anything I write makes me more and more modest about my own 'æsthesis.' That word 'masque' I will omit hereafter. The truth is, that I have drawn, modelled in clay, and picture fancied, so much in past years, that I have got unconsciously into the slang-for slang it is-and I am faulty therein.

"About the melodrama on the Glyder, I quite agree with you that some folks will carp. There was a cantankerous lady (I heard who she was, but forget—why not?) who attacked me fiercely on that score, anent' Westward Ho !' She knew not that the one point which infuriated her most, viz., the masts and sails and people looking red-hot against a black background instead of vice versâ, when Amyas is struck blind, was copied from the experience of a near relative who was struck senseless by a flash of lightning, and squinted and had weak eyes for years after. So much for the reward which one gets for copying

nature !

"In the Glyder scene I have copied nature most carefully, having surveyed every yard of the ground this summer. The vision of Snowdon towering and wet against the background of blue flame, appearing and disappearing every moment, was given me by Froude, who lived there three years, and saw it, and detailed it carefully, begging me to put it in! But why go on justifying? I don't think the deerstalkers of Park Lane and Belgravia will sneer, because they see such things in their field-sports, and are delighted when such men as Maxwell or St. John, or perhaps I—for they have told me so often-can put them into words for them; but the true snubbers are the cockneys who write for the press, and who judge of the universe from the experiences of the London suburbs, or a summer's watering-place trip. I have seen as awful sights here at the breaking up of a long drought; and what I wanted to do was boldly to defy criticism on that very point, calling the chapter Nature's Melodrama,' and showing, meanwhile, that the 'melodramatic element' was a false, and morbid, and cowardly one, by bringing in Naylor and Wynd, thinking the very same horrors capital fun. I would not have taken Elsley there if I had not taken them there also, as a wholesome foil to his madness.

"Claude and Sabina are altogether imaginary. Ever since 'Yeast,' I have been playing with them as two dolls, setting them to say and do

all the pretty naïve things any one else is too respectable to be sent about, till I know them as well as I know you. I have half-a-dozen pet people of that kind, whom I make talk and walk with me on the moors, and when I am at my parish work; and charming company they all are, only they get more and more wilful, being 'spoilt children,' and I cannot answer for any desperate aberration of theirs, either in doctrine or practice, from hour to hour. Like all the rest of human life, the best things which I get out of them are too good to be told. So nobody will ever know them, save a little of the outside. Writing novels is a farce and a sham. If any man could write the simple life of circle of five miles round his own house, as he knew, and could in many cases swear it to be, at that moment, no one would believe it; and least of all would those believe it who did believe it. Do you ask the meaning of the paradox?

"Those who know best that the facts are true, or might be true, would be those most interested in declaring them impossible. When any man or woman calls anything 'over-drawn,' try them, if you can, by the argument

66

"Now, confess.

Have you not seen, and perhaps done, stranger things?' And in proportion to their honesty and geniality they will answer, 'Yes.'

"I have never found this fail, with people who were human, and were capable of having any history' at all."

CHAPTER XVIII.

1858.

AGED 39.

EVERSLEY WORK-DIPHTHERIA-LECTURES AND SERMONS AT ALDERSHOT— BLESSING THE COLOURS OF THE 22ND REGIMENT-STAFF COLLEGE— ADVANCED THINKERS-LETTER FROM REV. G. BOYLE-POEMS AND SANTA MAURA-LETTER FROM DR. MONSELL-LETTERS TO DR. MONSELL, MR. LEWIS, DEAN STANLEY, &C.-LETTER FROM CAPTAIN CONGREVE-BIRTH OF HIS SON GRENVILLE-SECOND VISIT TO YORKSHIRE-CORRESPONDENCE WITH MR. HULLAH ON SONGS-THE LAST BUCCANEER-THE KNIGHT'S LEAP-A HAPPY CHRISTMAS-LETTERS ON MIRACLES TO SIR WILLIAM COPE.

"HE was what he was, not by virtue of his office, but by virtue of what God had made him in himself. He was, we might almost say, a layman in the guise or disguise of a clergyman-fishing with the fishermen, hunting with the huntsmen, able to hold his own in tent and camp, with courtier or with soldier; an example that a genial companion may be a Christian gentleman—that a Christian clergyman need not be a member of a separate caste, and a stranger to the common interests of his countrymen. Yet human, genial layman as he was, he still was not the less-nay, he was ten times more-a pastor than he would have been had he shut himself out from the haunts and walks of men. He was sent by Providence, as it were, 'far off to the Gentiles'-far off, not to other lands or other races of mankind, but far off from the usual sphere of minister or priest, 'to fresh woods and pastures new,' to find fresh worlds of thoughts and wild tracts of character, in which he found a response to himself, because he gave a response to them."

A. P. STANLEY

(Funeral Sermon on Canon Kingsley).

CHAPTER XVIII.

THIS was a year of severe work and anxiety, for he could not afford a curate. Diphtheria, then a new disease in England, appeared in the neighbourhood, and was very fatal. It created a panic, and to him it was a new enemy to be hated, and fought against, as it was his wont to hate and fight against every form of disease, and especially those which he suspected to come from malaria, and other preventible causes. Its prevalence among children, and cases in his own parish, affected and excited him, and he took counsel with medical men, as to how to meet the earliest symptoms of the new foe. When it reached Eversley, some might have smiled at seeing him, going in and out of the cottages with great bottles of gargle under his arm, and teaching the people-men, women, and children, to gargle their throats, as a preventive; but to him it was terrible grim earnest, acting as he did on Thomas Carlyle's principle, "Wheresoever thou findest disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him, make order of him."

His work for the Hants and Wilts Education Society, to which he had bound himself to give so many lectures annually, in lieu of subscription, was heavy: he lectured on local geology, on Chaucer, on Jack of Newbury, and Flodden Field, and on the Days of the Week; in those days seldom repeating the same lecture. The position of Eversley with regard to Chobham, Aldershot, and Sandhurst, brought him more and more in contact with military men, and widened his sphere of influence. The society of soldiers as a class was congenial to him. He inherited much of the soldier spirit, as he inherited soldier blood; and the few of his direct ancestors' portraits that have survived the wreck of his family, are all of men in uniform, including,