No! as I said at the end of the last chapter but one, before I was led away by the circumstances of that time to give the world the benefit of my magnetic reminiscences valeat quantum! I was not yet bitten, despite Colley Grattan’s urgings, with any temptation to attempt fiction, and “passion, me boy!” But I am surprised on turning over my old diaries to find how much I was writing, and planning to write, in those days, and not less surprised at the amount of running about which I accomplished.

My life in those years of the thirties must have been a very busy one. I find myself writing and sending off a surprising number of “articles” on all sorts of subjects reviews, sketches of travel, biographical notices, fragments from the byeways of history, and the like, to all kinds of periodical publications, many of them long since dead and forgotten. That the world should have forgotten all these articles “goes without saying.” But what is not perhaps so common an incident in the career of a penman is, that I had in the majority of cases utterly forgotten them, and all about them, until they were recalled to mind by turning the yellow pages of my treasured but almost equally forgotten journals! I beg to observe, also, that all this pen-work was not only printed, but paid for. My motives were of a decidedly mercenary description. “Hic scribit fama ductus, at ille fame.” I belonged emphatically to the latter category, and little indeed of my multifarious productions ever found its final resting place in the waste-paper basket. They were rejected often, but re-despatched a second and a third time, if necessary, to some other “organ,” and eventually swallowed by some editor or other.

I am surprised, too, at the amount of locomotion which I contrived to combine with all this scribbling. I must have gone about, I think, like a tax-gatherer, with an inkstand slung to my button-hole! And in truth I was industrious; for I find myself in full swing of some journey, arriving at my inn tired at night, and finishing and sending off some article before I went to my bed. But it must have been only by means of the joint supplies contributed by all my editors that I could have found the means of paying all the stage-coaches, diligences, and steamboats which I find the record of my continually employing. “Navibus atque Quadrigis petimus bene vivere!” And I succeeded by their means in living, if not well, at least very pleasantly.

For I was born a rambler.

I heard just now a story of a little boy, who replied to the common question, “What he would like to be when he grew up?” by saying that he should like to be either a giant or a retired stockbroker! I find the qualifying adjective delicious, and admire the pronounced taste for repose indicated by either side of the alternative. But my propensities were more active, and in the days before I entered my teens I used always to reply to similar demands, that I would be a “king’s messenger”! I knew no other life which approached so nearly to perpetual motion. “The road” was my paradise, and it is a true saying that the child is father to the man. The Shakespearian passage which earliest impressed my childish mind and carried with it my heartiest sympathies was the song of old Autolycus:

“Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
Your merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.”

Over how many miles of “foot-path way,” under how many green hedges, has my childish treble chanted that enlivening ditty!

But that was in much earlier days to those I am now writing of.

During the years between my dreary time at Birmingham and my first departure for Italy, I find the record of many pedestrian or other rambles in England and abroad. There they are, all recorded day by day the qualities of the inns and the charges at them (not so much less than those of the present day as might be imagined, with the exception of the demands for beds), the beauty and specialties of the views, the talk of wayfaring companions, the careful measurements of the churches, the ever-recurring ascent of the towers of them, &c. &c.

Here and there in the mountains of chaff there may be a grain worth preserving, as where I read that at Haddon Hall the old lady who showed the house, and who boasted that her ancestors had been servitors of the possessors of it for more than three hundred years, pointed out to me the portrait of one of them, who had been “forester,” hanging in the hall. She also pointed out the window from which a certain heiress had eloped, and by doing so had carried the hall and lands into the family of the present owners, and told me that Mrs. Radcliffe, shortly before the publication of her Mysteries of Udolpho, had visited Haddon, and had sat at that window busily writing for a long time.

I seem to have been an amateur of sermons in those days, from the constant records I find of sermons listened to, by no means always, or indeed generally, complimentary to the preachers. Here is an entry criticising, with young presumption, a sermon by Dr. Dibdin, whose bibliophile books, however, I had much taste for.

“I heard Dr. Dibdin preach. He preached with much gesticulation, emphasis, and grimace the most utterly trashy sermon I ever heard; words words words without the shadow of an idea in them.”

I remember, as if it were yesterday, a shrewd sort of an old lady, the mother, I think, of the curate of the parish, who heard me, as we were leaving the church, expressing my opinion of the doctor’s discourse, saying, “Well, it is a very old story, young gentleman, and it is mighty difficult to find anything new to say about it!”

The bibliomaniacal doctor, however, seems to have pleased me better out of the pulpit than in it, for I find that “he called in the afternoon and chatted amusingly for an hour. He fell tooth and nail upon the Oxford Tracts men, and told us of a Mr. Wackerbarth, a curate in Essex, a Cambridge man, who, he says, elevates the host, crosses himself, and advocates burning of heretics. It seems to me, however,” continues this censorious young diarist, “that those who object to the persecution, even to extermination of heretics, admit the uncertainty and dubiousness of all theological doctrine and belief. For if it be certain that God will punish disbelief in doctrines essential to salvation, and certain that any Church possesses the knowledge what those doctrines are, does it not follow that a man who goes about persuading people to reject those doctrines should be treated as we treat a mad dog loose in the streets of a city?” Thus fools, when they are young enough, rush in where wise men fear to tread!

I had entirely forgotten, but find from my diary that it was our pleasant friend but indifferent preacher, Dr. Dibdin, who on the 11th of February, 1839, married my sister, Cecilia, to Mr., now Sir John, Tilley.

It appears that I was not incapable of appreciating a good sermon when I heard one, for I read of the impression produced upon me by an “admirable sermon preached by Mr. Smith” (it must have been Sydney, I take it) in the Temple Church. The preacher quoted largely from Jeremy Taylor, “giving the passages with an excellence of enunciation and expression which impressed them on my mind in a manner which will not allow me to forget them.” Alack! I have forgotten every word of them!

I remember, however, perfectly well, without any reference to my diary, hearing it must have been much about the same time Sydney Smith preach a sermon at St. Paul’s, which much impressed me. He took for his text, “Knowledge and wisdom shall be the stability of thy times” (I write from memory the memory of half a century ago but I think the words ran thus). Of course the gist of his discourse may be readily imagined. But the manner of the preacher remains more vividly present to my mind than his words. He spoke with extreme rapidity, and had the special gift of combining extreme rapidity of utterance with very perfect clearness. His manner, I remember thinking, was unlike any that I had ever witnessed in the pulpit, and appeared to me to resemble rather that of a very earnest speaker at the hustings than the usual pulpit style. His sentences seemed to run downhill, with continually increasing speed till they came to a full stop at the bottom. It was, I think, the only sermon I ever heard which I wished longer. He carried me with him completely, for the century was in those days, like me, young. But if I were to hear a similarly fervid discourse now on the same subject, I should surely desire some clearer setting forth of the difference between “knowledge” and “wisdom.”

It was about this time, i.e., in the year 1839, that my mother, who had been led, by I forget what special circumstances, to take a great interest in the then hoped-for factory legislation, and in Lord Shaftesbury’s efforts in that direction, determined to write a novel on the subject with the hope of doing something towards attracting the public mind to the question, and to visit Lancashire for the purpose of obtaining accurate information and local details.

The novel was written, published in the then newly-invented fashion of monthly numbers, and called Michael Armstrong. The publisher, Mr. Colburn, paid a long price for it, and did not complain of the result. But it never became one of the more popular among my mother’s novels, sharing, I suppose, the fate of most novels written for some purpose other than that of amusing their readers. Novel readers are exceedingly quick to smell the rhubarb under the jam in the dose offered to them, and set themselves against the undesired preachment, as obstinately as the naughtiest little boy who ever refused to be physicked with nastiness for his good.

My mother neglected no means of making the facts stated in her book authentic and accurate, and the mise en scene of her story graphic and truthful. Of course I was the companion of her journey, and was more or less useful to her in searching for and collecting facts in some places where it would have been difficult for her to look for them. We carried with us a number of introductions from Lord Shaftesbury to a rather strange assortment of persons, whom his lordship had found useful both as collectors of trustworthy information, and energetic agitators in favour of legislation.

The following letter from the Earl of Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, to my mother on the subject, is illustrative of the strong interest he took in the matter, and of the means which he thought necessary for obtaining information respecting it:

“MADAM, The letters to Macclesfield and Manchester shall be sent by this evening’s post. On your arrival at Macclesfield be so kind as to ask for Reuben Bullock, of Roe Street, and at Manchester for John Doherty, a small bookseller of Hyde’s Cross in the town. They will show you the secrets of the place, as they showed them to me.

“Mr. Wood himself is not now resident in Bradford, he is at present in Hampshire; but his partner, Mr. Walker, carries out all his plans with the utmost energy. I will write to him to-night. The firm is known by the name of ‘Wood and Walker,’ Mr. Wood is a person whom you may easily see in London on your return to town. With every good wish and prayer for your success,

“I remain your very obedient servant,

“ASHLEY.

“P.S. The Quarterly Review of December, 1836, contains an article on the factory system, which would greatly assist by the references to the evidence before Committee, &c. &c.”

It is useless here and now to say anything of the horrors of uncivilised savagery and hopeless abject misery which we witnessed. They are painted in my mother’s book, and should any reader ever refer to those pages for a picture of the state of things among the factory hands at that time, he may take with him my testimony to the fact that there was no exaggeration in the outlines of the picture given. What we are there described to have seen, we saw.

And let doctrinaire economists preach as they will, and Radical socialists abuse a measure, which helps to take from them the fulcrum of the levers that are to upset the whole existing framework of society, it is impossible for one who did see those sights, and who has visited the same localities in later days, not to bless Lord Shaftesbury’s memory, ay, and the memory, if they have left any, of the humble assistants whose persistent efforts helped on the work.

But the little knot of apostles to whom Lord Shaftesbury’s letters introduced us, and into whose intimate conciliabules his recommendations caused our admittance, was to my mother, and yet more to me, to whom the main social part of the business naturally fell, a singularly new and strange one. They were all, or nearly all of them, men a little raised above the position of the factory hands, to the righting of whose wrongs they devoted their lives. They had been at some period of their lives, in almost every case, factory workers themselves, but had by various circumstances, native talent, industry, and energy, or favouring fortune more likely by all together managed to raise themselves out of the slough of despond in which their fellows were overwhelmed. One, I remember, a Mr. Doherty, a very small bookseller, to whom we were specially recommended by Lord Shaftesbury. He was an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, and a furious Radical, but a very clever man. He was thoroughly acquainted with all that had been done, all that it was hoped to do, and with all the means that were being taken for the advancement of those hopes, over the entire district.

He came and dined with us at our hotel, but it was, I remember, with much difficulty that we persuaded him to do so, and when at table his excitement in talking was so great and continuous that he could eat next to nothing.

I remember, too, a Rev. Mr. Bull, to whom he introduced us subsequently at Bradford. We passed the evening with this gentleman at the house of Mr. Wood, of the firm of Walker and Wood, to whom also we had letters from Lord Shaftesbury. He, like our host, was an ardent advocate of the ten hours’ bill, but unlike him, had very little hope of legislative interference. Messrs. Walker and Wood employed three thousand hands. At a sacrifice of some thousands per annum, they worked their hands an hour less than any of their neighbours, which left the hours, as Mr. Wood strongly declared, still too long. Those gentlemen had built and endowed a church and a school for their hands, and everything was done in their mill which could humanise and improve the lot of the men, women, and children. Mr. Bull, who was to be the incumbent of the new church, then not quite finished, was far less hopeful than his patron. He told me that he looked forward to some tremendous popular outbreak, and should not be surprised any night to hear that every mill in Bradford was in flames.

But perhaps the most remarkable individual with whom this Lancashire journey brought us into contact, was a Mr. Oastler. He was the Danton of the movement. He would have been a remarkable man in any position or calling in life. He was a very large and powerfully framed man, over six feet in height, and proportionately large of limb and shoulder. He would, perhaps, hardly have been said to be a handsome man. His face was coarse, and in parts of it heavy. But he had a most commanding presence, and he was withal a picturesque if it be not more accurate to say a statuesque figure. Some of the features, too, were good. He had a very keen and intelligent blue eye, a mass of iron grey hair, lips, the scornful curl of which was terrible, and with all this a voice stentorian in its power, and yet flexible, with a flow of language rapid and abundant as the flow of a great river, and as unstemmable the very beau-ideal of a mob orator.

“In the evening,” says my diary, “we drove out to Stayley Bridge to hear the preaching of Stephens, the man who has become the subject of so much newspaper celebrity,” (Does any one remember who he was?) “We reached a miserable little chapel, filled to suffocation, and besieged by crowds around the doors. We entered through the vestry with very great difficulty, and only so by the courtesy of sundry persons who relinquished their places, on Doherty’s representing to them that we were strangers from a distance and friends to the cause. Presently Stephens arrived, and a man who had been ranting in the pulpit, merely, as it seemed, to occupy the people till he should come, immediately yielded his place to him. Stephens spoke well, and said some telling words in that place, of the cruel and relentless march of the great Juggernauth, Gold. But I did not hear anything which seemed to me to justify his great reputation. Really the most striking part of the performance, and that which I thought seemed to move the people most, was Oastler’s mounting the pulpit and giving out the verses of a hymn, one by one, which the congregation sang after him.” So says my diary. Him I remember well, though Stephens not at all. I remember, too, the pleasure with which I listened to his really fine delivery of the lines; his pronunciation of the words was not incorrect, and when he spoke, as I heard him on sundry subsequent occasions, his language, though emphasised rather, as it seemed, than marred by a certain roughness of Lancashire accent, was not that of an uncultivated man. Yes! Oastler, the King of Lancashire as the people liked to call him, was certainly a man of power, and an advocate whom few platform orators would have cared to meet as an adversary.

When my mother’s notes for her projected novel were completed, we thought that before turning our faces southwards, we would pay a flying visit to the lake district, which was new ground to both of us. I remember well my intense delight at my first introduction to mountains worthy of the name. But I mean to mention here two only of my reminiscences of that first visit to lake-land.

The first of these concerns an excursion on Windermere with Captain Hamilton, the author of Cyril Thornton, which had at that time made its mark. He had recently received a new boat, which had been built for him in Norway. He expected great performances from her, and as there was a nice fresh wind idly curling the surface of the lake, he invited us to come out with him and try her, and in a minute or two we were speeding merrily before the breeze towards the opposite shore. But about the middle of the lake we found the water a good deal rougher, and the wind began to increase notably. Hamilton held the tiller, and not liking to make fast the haulyard of the sail, gave me the rope to hold, with instructions to hold on till further orders. He was a perfect master of the business in hand, and so was the new boat a perfect mistress of her business, but this did not prevent us from getting thoroughly ducked. My attention was sufficiently occupied in obeying my orders, and keeping my eye on him in expectation of fresh ones. The wind meanwhile increased from minute to minute, and I could not help perceiving that Hamilton, despite his cheery laughter, was becoming a little anxious. We got back, however, to the shore we had left after a good buffeting, and in the condition of drowned rats. My mother was helped out of the boat, and while she was making her way up the bank, and I was helping him to make the boat secure, I said, “Well! the new boat has done bravely!” “Between you and me, my dear fellow,” said he, as he laid his hand on my shoulder with a grip, that I think must have left his thumb-mark on the skin, “if the boat had not behaved better than any boat of her class that I ever saw, there would have been a considerable probability of our being dined on by the fishes, instead of dining together, as I hope we are going to do! I have been blaming myself for taking your mother out; but the truth is that on these lakes it is really impossible to tell for half an hour what the next half hour may bring forth.”

The one other incident of our visit to lake-land which I will record, was our visit to Wordsworth.

For my part I managed to incur his displeasure while yet on the threshold of his house. We were entering it together, when observing a very fine bay-tree by the door-side, I unfortunately expressed surprise at its luxuriance in such a position. “Why should you be surprised?” he asked, suddenly turning upon me with much displeasure in his manner. Not a little disconcerted, I hesitatingly answered that I had imagined the bay-tree required more and greater warmth of sunshine than it could find there. “Pooh!” said he, much offended at the slight cast on his beloved locality, “what has sunshine got to do with it?”

I had not the readiness to reply, that in truth the world had abundance of testimony that the bay could flourish in those latitudes! But I think, had I done so it might have made my peace for the remainder of that evening’s experiences led me to imagine that the great poet was not insensible to incense from very small and humble worshippers.

The evening, I think I may say the entire evening, was occupied by a monologue addressed by the poet to my mother, who was of course extremely well pleased to listen to it. I was chiefly occupied in talking to my old schoolfellow, Herbert Hill, Southey’s nephew, who also passed the evening there, and with whom I had a delightful walk the next day. But I did listen with much pleasure when Wordsworth recited his own lines descriptive of Little Langdale. He gave them really exquisitely. But his manner in conversation was not impressive. He sat continuously looking down with a green shade over his eyes even though it was twilight; and his mode of speech and delivery suggested to me the epithet “maundering,” though I was ashamed of myself for the thought with reference to such a man. As we came away I cross-examined my mother much as to the subjects of his talk. She said it had been all about himself and his works, and that she had been interested. But I could not extract from her a word that had passed worth recording.

I do not think that he was popular with his neighbours generally. There were stories current, at Lowther among other places, which imputed to him a tendency to outstay his welcome when invited to visit in a house. I suspect there was a little bit of a feud between him and my brother-in-law, Mr. Tilley, who was the Post Office surveyor of the district. Wordsworth as receiver of taxes, or issuer of licenses or whatever it was, would have increased the profits of his place if the mail coach had paid its dues, whether for taxes or license, at his end of the journey instead of at Kendal, as had been the practice. But of course any such change would have been as much to the detriment of the man at Kendal as to Wordsworth’s advantage. And my brother-in-law, thinking such a change unjust, would not permit it.

I cannot say that on the whole the impression made on me by the poet on that occasion (always with the notable exception of his recital of his own poetry) was a pleasant one. There was something in the manner in which he almost perfunctorily, as it seemed, uttered his long monologue, that suggested the idea of the performance of a part got up to order, and repeated without much modification as often as lion-hunters, duly authorised for the sport in those localities, might call upon him for it. I dare say the case is analogous to that of the hero and the valet, but such was my impression.