The Forties and Fifties

IN old days--our old boy and girl days--it was a custom with us every evening to draw sketches of what had occurred during the day. Anything and everything that happened was drawn. One morning, riding to covert my uncle pointed out to my cousin--a boy home for the holidays--the beautiful effects of the sun shining on the dew in the ditches. This was heard by the groom behind, and when in the course of the day the boy got a fall, he said, with a grin, "I say, sir, did you see the Jew in the ditch when you fell in?" Needless to say, this was all drawn that night. As we grew up, we sketched more violently. I remember, especially, the long, cold, dreary winter of the Crimean war, how in the evenings we young ones sat round a lamp-lit table in a corner of the drawing-room, sketching our hardest--horses generally--and listening with bated breath to the sad, murmuring voices of the ladies and the guests, most of whom had relations out at the war, and who discussed sadly the news of the morning papers, or that rare event, a letter, while their fingers plied busily at the formation of woollen mitts and comforters to be sent out to the seat of war. As in those bygone times one's pencil sketches depicted all the pains and pleasures of each day, to be referred to with regret or relief, so in one's life, since certain shadowy memories of the past are indelibly photographed on one's mind, as sorts of snapshots here and there along the road side.

One's earliest memories are of a little Cheshire village on the banks of the Mersey, a small place, where the cottages were smothered in damson-trees--damsels, as the people called them--and where outlying farms stretched away over a wild Moss, redolent with sweet gale, to traverse which they had to put flat wooden clogs on the horses' feet, to prevent their sinking in the soft black peat. A lonely place, utterly cut off from the outer world; Cromwell might have been Protector, a Stuart, or an Orangeman might have reigned, and it was all the same to the inhabitants. The only means of communication with the world was by a steamer, which ran from Manchester to Liverpool, called the " Old Jack," or what was called a " Swift Boat," which was galloped by relays of horses along the Bridgewater Canal, some two miles distant. The old church, one of the few timber and plaster ones remaining, supported on solid oak pillars garnished with stag's tynes whereon to hang men's hats, and the Rectory, were on the site of a Pre-monstratensien Monastery of the thirteenth century, and stone coffins had been dug up in a field called the Abbey Croft. There were old men who could tell you how their fathers had seen Cumberland's troops ford the river on their way to fight Prince Charlie, and they themselves had gruesome tales of a hunting Rector in the beginning of the last century, who, when the doctors came from Manchester to exhume bodies from the churchyard, gave them brandy after their hideous work, and people remembered seeing him take funerals with a surplice flung over his scarlet, and top boots, while his man held his horse at the gate on hunting days. There were many odd, old customs, such as the Rush-bearing, when there was a sort of Wake, and carts decorated with flowers went about, and people were more or less tipsy. This took place about the middle of August, and I suppose was a relic of the festivities on the Feast of the Assumption. On November 1st the wilder young men used to go about with lanterns at night, one wearing a horse's skull, which they called "Old Nobs," and went to the farmers' homes for drink or money. I recollect it coming into our kitchen and prancing about, much to the delight of the maids. That must have been the relic of the Soulers, being the eve of All Souls' Day. I was brought up in what is called High Church views. My father entered keenly into the Oxford Movement, and was thought a most extreme man of those days. He preached in a surplice, and used Gauntlett's Psalter, which I believe was a predecessor of Helmore's. For myself, I don't think Church matters ever entered my head. I loved to run wild about the garden with the dogs, and I cared more for horses than anything else in the world, a taste inherited from my mother, who came from the grass counties, had been taught to ride anything, and--as the expression went--"hold on by her eyelids." An old clergyman has told me since, that when she came to Cheshire as a bride, her riding was the admiration of all the country-side. But the old Tractarians were made of stern stuff, and she and my father did not think it right that a Parson and his wife should go galloping about everywhere, added to which, money grew short, and the keeping of horses an impossibility.

As I said, things were very different in those days. Autre temps, autres murs. My grandfather, an old Peninsula officer, when he taught me riding, wore a high hat and blue coat with brass buttons, and I a blue plaid pelisse and large black beaver bonnet. Neither of my grandmothers, till the time of their death, ever sat otherwise than bolt upright--I suppose the result of the backboard in their early days--and both always wore thick stiff black silk gowns, which I should think would have stood by themselves when taken off. Gold, they pronounced goold; china, chancy; and an errand was an arrant. The cloth was removed for dessert, and the glasses used to look beautiful, reflected on the polished mahogany.

I have told you my father was a Tractarian, and we had been taught entirely on High Church lines, but matters in general were very different. Things which people now-a-days take as a matter of course, had then to be fought for, and the pioneers of those days were hard fighting men. No one would believe the storms elicited by preaching in a surplice! "Sacrament Sundays" were very few and far between. Etiquette in many parishes prescribed that the squire, the parson, and other dignitaries, with their families, should communicate first, and then the common throng. I remember once what an uproar there was in a country village because a farmer's wife went up to the "First Table." All the gossips said, "They'd a thought the 'Second Table' was good enough for her!" The music and hymns were not much. In my father's church, being High, we used the metrical version of the Psalms, but his death, when I was nine years old, sent us away into the ordinary dreariness of church matters of the day. We sat under the dullest of sermons, enforced by pointings from a lavender gloved forefinger, and our hymnody was the "Mitre Collection," the only one of which I cared for was,

"What hath GOD wrought, let Britain see, Freed from the Papal tyranny."

because it brought a bit of history into the dulness of the Sunday Service, gone through in a square green baize-lined pew. I believe our church was better than many others: I remember seeing one in South Wales where the wood was all rotten, the pew-doors off their hinges, and great yellow toads crawling in and out of the broken floor and wood work around the font; and there was another church where the men who played the violin, bass, and other instruments of music, all sat inside the altar-rails, using the altar itself for a table. Edmund Sedding's little collection of sketches, called Deformation and Reformation, published about 1859, showing how things were, and how they ought to be, gives the best ideas of the then existent state of churches.

I remember, as a child of ten years old, during a brief residence in the old-fashioned town of Kettering, my intense delight at hearing one of the curates, an evangelical of the evangelicals, preach in a high, shrill voice on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, out of a mighty three-decker, gesticulating at every sentence, and pouring forth denunciations which echoed through the lofty church. I don't remember what he said, but I remember how he banged, and how I liked it. Of other clergy whom I came across in my early days, I don't recollect much individually. One was a very hard rider, and I remember my grandfather saying, "He bumped so high you could stick a quart bottle between him and the saddle every time he rose in his stirrups."

Young ladies never dreamed of the wider possibilities open to them now: there were no Ladies' Settlements, no Lady Nurses, no Girton, Newnham, S. Margaret's. They gardened, sketched, rode, went to archery meetings, and were just beginning to visit their poor and teach in the Sunday School. The emancipation of woman had not yet then arrived. Their horizon was then very borné. The more advanced of them had crosses on their Prayer Books, and when they had the opportunity went to daily Matins, but they were stigmatized as Puseyites. I remember--I was staying away from home--in 1858, when I first began to think seriously of things, buying a plaster crucifix from an Italian boy who came round with images, and keeping it hidden in a drawer among my handkerchiefs lest any one should spy it out. I remember after a Confirmation, by the Bishop of Peterborough, in the same year, going to luncheon to meet him and the neighbouring clergy. One, who sat next me, a very admirable man, a good parish worker, and, like all Irishmen, a capital teller of stories, was saying how one of the candidates, coming out of All Saints', Northampton, had picked some one's pocket, and he added, "That shows ye, doesn't it, what nonsense it is that grace is given you in Confirmation."

But the Tractarian leaven was working, slowly but surely, and there was an universal feeling of awakening all around. A most wonderful episode was the story of the heroic deeds of the little band of Priests at S. Saviour's, Leeds, during the cholera visitation of 1849-50. In the following year I saw Canon Beckett, the only one of the company remaining, after the others joined the Roman Communion. He was a guest at Arley, a tall, thin, pale, closely shaven man, in a long coat touching his heels, and, child as I was, his devout, saintly appearance left a never-to-be-forgotten impression on my mind. Indeed, I am afraid the things I did forget were my manners, for I was so intent staring at him, and listening to him speak, that I fell into a grip, out of which he had to pull me. Sisterhoods were just making their first trial, and I recollect hearing a good deal about Miss Sellon and her work at Devonport; but I still repeat I took no interest in these things until the year 1857. Something suddenly seemed to come into my heart that put everything in a different light before me. I can tell the very day, February 23rd; and the very place--I was out on the Mere in a boat with my cousins, pulling up weeds. I had heard about a wonderful Mission being carried on by a certain Rev. Henry Collins, a young enthusiastic Priest, in an out of the way part of London, among the roughest and the most sinful people at the London Docks. It all seemed to appeal to me at once. I wrote off at once to the Mission for two tracts of Mr. Collins' I had seen advertised. I had heard so much of the lives of him and his companions, which sounded like the stories of mediaeval saints, how they lived together in great poverty--such great poverty that sometimes they had only bread for their dinner. Their clothes were ragged and patched, for they spent every penny they had upon their poor. A benevolent lady sent Henry Collins a violet velvet sermon case, after the fashion of the day. This was no use to him, who only preached extempore, so he mended a gap in his clothes with it. I never saw him in his mission work, but I believe there was a special love and earnestness in him which went straight to the hearts of the poor souls among whom he laboured. Anyhow, though I never saw him then, he influenced me inexpressibly, and this was accentuated by a letter of thanks he wrote when my brothers and I had given up some expedition and sent the money to him for his Mission. Like so many enthusiasts of that day, Mr. Collins and his little band were chilled and repressed by the coldness of Church authorities, and joined the Roman Communion. He became a Cistercian monk, and years after he came to see me in Haggerston, and ask if he could not consummate what he had begun, and get me to follow him to Rome. But that could never be. He is chiefly given to literature now, and edits quaint and curious old books for the Ascetic Library, and he has written a most lovely and helpful book, called Heaven Opened.

Among the men of the day who helped on the Church upward movement to a very great extent, was Mr. Rowland Egerton Warburton, of Arley, Cheshire. "The Squire," as the late Bishop Wilberforce used to call him. And a veritable ideal squire he was, seeming, as Lord Halifax once said of him, to be a perfect combination of a good churchman, a good landlord, a keen sportsman, and a man of literary tastes. In the thirties, and early forties, when Keble, Pusey, and Newman tried to pull the Church out of the depths into which she had sunk, when laymen, as a rule, took very little part in Church matters, the young squire of Arley flung himself with the keenest interest into the Tractarian Movement. When he rebuilt the Hall, he attached a beautiful chapel to it. And in days when daily prayer was scarcely heard of, all the household assembled within its walls, and a surpliced choir chanted choral Matins. Never was the squire missing from his place, and on hunting mornings he always appeared in scarlet and buckskins. Right on in his old age, so long as he was able to get about, in spite of the blindness which came upon him during the last twenty years of his life, it was touching to see him kneeling still as he had done for past years, and when at last he was no longer able to get about, he was carried downstairs and wheeled in a chair into chapel. He was one of the first members of the English Church Union. It is rarely so many different qualities have been united in one man as they were in him. A man of the most refined and elegant tastes, whatever he touched he improved and ennobled, and more than that, he had the gift of leaving his own special mark upon it. His love for and knowledge of architecture and archæology are visible in his own home of Arley Hall, and in the many model farms and cottages built scattered over his estate, both at Aston, Warburton, and Great Budworth. He always built them of red brick; he used to say he loved the harmony of red brick breaking the background of green trees. Some of these in Great Budworth have timbered upper stories, filled in with plaster, on which are traced the artistic designs of his son, the present Master of Arley. A great desire of his heart was accomplished a few years ago, and that was, a new church at Warburton, as the old one--one of the very few churches in England of timber and plaster--was too far from the village, and otherwise unsuitable for the people. He placed over the doorway the figure of S. Werburga, the patroness of Chester, looking southward over the wooded plains of fertile Cheshire.

As a landlord his whole heart was centred in the improvement of his estate and the well-being of his tenantry. He instituted the Arley Wakes on the 8th September, the annual anniversary of the dedication of the chapel, when the tenants met to enjoy the old fashion of English sports and pastimes; and his May Day festivities were highly commended by the late Rev. J. E. Bennett, in his Letters to my Children. All these were going on, we must remember, long before it was the custom to think of helping to brighten the lives of our poorer friends, as, I am thankful to say, it is in the present day. He was a keen sportsman, a daring rider--"little Rowley the steeplechase rider," as he is described in a local song of some sixty years ago--and his own well-known volume of Hunting Songs may well claim him the title of Poet Laureate of the Hunting Field. He was gifted with a most intense sense of humour, thoroughly enjoying the point of a joke, and always seeing the humorous side of everything. He was a man of letters, well versed in literature, as may be seen from his library, among which are several rare and choice editions. And who can speak enough as to the purity of the noble Christian life which shone forth in the sacred inner circle of his own family? His kindliness, his thoughtfulness for all, in little and great ways, his loving sympathy--who, with whom he ever came in contact, but has felt all these?

His patience during the seventeen long years of his blindness was most beautiful, and the deprivation of sight to one so keenly interested in seeing and doing must have been, indeed, a very heavy cross! Over the fireplace of the gallery at Arley he had inscribed, "Hope confidently; do valiantly; wait patiently," and these words seem to have been the key-note of his whole life; and the hoping of youth and the doing of manhood were past and over, and the shadows of evening gathered around, he waited in uncomplaining patience till the day that the LORD should restore his sight, when his first vision was that of the King in His Beauty!

It was at Arley that I first met the Rev. Charles Gutch, afterwards Vicar of S. Cyprian's, Marylebone. In 1854 he temporarily took the chaplaincy there, and I remember at Christmas his bringing the choir boys in their white surplices, with lighted candles in their hands, to sing Dr. Neale's carols in the hall. He prepared me for Confirmation. I then lost sight of him for three years, till, as I said, Mr. Collins' influence induced me to think of becoming a Sister, and my choice would have been with Miss Neale's Sisterhood of the Holy Cross at Wapping. But Mr. Gutch, whose opinion was asked on the subject, objected that I was too young for such a work, and suggested my trying S. Margaret's, East Grinstead.

A Community in the heart of the country, was the last thing I naturally desired. Since I had been touched by religion I had studied Butler's Lives of S. Francis Xavier and S. Charles Borromeo, and only longed for Mission work to emulate those saints, and to feel I was a fellow-labourer of the Priests at S. George's Mission. However, Tout vient à qui sait attendre. I went to S. Margaret's, and the very year I went, Dr. Neale undertook London mission work, and I was one of those sent there.

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