own composition, commencing,
‘I sing a song of ancient men,
Of warriors great and bold,
Of Hercules, a famous man,
Who lived in times of old.
He was a man of great renown,
A lion large he slew,
And to his memory games were kept,
Which now I tell to you,’
which they got me to repeat in their drawing-room, and which, though I say it that should not, evinced for a boy a fair acquaintance with ‘Mangnall’s Questions’ and Pinnock’s abridgment of Goldsmith’s ‘History of Rome.’ Happily, at that time, Niebuhr was unknown, and sceptical criticism had not begun its deadly work. We had not to go far for truth then. It was quite unnecessary to seek it – at any rate, so it seemed to us – at the bottom of a well; there it was right underneath one’s nose – before one’s very eyes in the printed pages of the printed book.
Agnes Strickland did all she could to confer reputation on her native county. The tall, dark, self-possessed lady from Reydon Hall was a lion everywhere. On one occasion she visited the House of Lords, just after she had written a violent letter against Lord Campbell, charging him with plagiarism. Campbell tells us he had a conversation with her, which speedily turned her into a friend. He adds: ‘I thought Brougham would have died with envy when I told him the result of my interview, and Ellenborough, who was sitting by, lifted his hands in admiration. Brougham had thrown me a note across the table, saying: “So you know your friend Miss Strickland has come to hear you.”’ Miss Strickland often visited Alison, the historian, at Possil House. He says of her that she had strong talents of a masculine rather than feminine character – indefatigable perseverance, and that ardour in whatever pursuit she engaged in without which no one could undergo similar fatigue. On one occasion she was descanting on the noble feeling of Queen Mary, ‘That may all be very true, Miss Strickland,’ replied the historian; ‘but unfortunately she had an awkward habit of burning people – she brought 239 men, women, and children to the stake in a reign which did not extend beyond a few years!’ ‘Oh yes,’ was her reply, ‘it was terrible, dreadful, but it was the fault of the age – the temper of the times; Mary herself was everything that is noble and heroic.’ Such was her feminine tendency to hero-worship. Another tendency of a feminine character was her love of talking. ‘She did,’ instances Sir Archibald, ‘not even require an answer or a sign of mutual intelligence; it was enough if the one she was addressing simply remained passive. One day when I was laid up at Possil on my library sofa from a wound in the knee, she was kind enough to sit with me for two hours, and was really very entertaining, from the number of anecdotes she remembered of queens in the olden time. When she left the room she expressed herself kindly to Mrs. Alison as to the agreeable time she had spent, and the latter said to me on coming in, “What did you get to say to Miss Strickland all this time? She says you were so agreeable, and she was two hours here.” “Say!” I replied with truth; “I assure you I did not say six words to her the whole time.”’ Agnes was a terrible one to talk – as, indeed, all the Stricklands were. In Suffolk such accomplished conversationalists were rare.
It must have been, now I come to think of it, a dismal old house, suggestive of rats and dampness and mould, that Reydon Hall, with its scantily furnished rooms and its unused attics and its empty barns and stables, with a general air of decay all over the place, inside and out. It had a dark, heavy roof and whitewashed walls, and was externally anything but a showy place, standing, as it did, a little way from the road. It must have been a difficulty with the family to keep up the place, and the style of living was altogether plain; yet there I heard a good deal of literary life in London, of Thomas Pringle, the poet, and the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, whose ‘Residence in South Africa’ is still one of the most interesting books on that quarter of the world, and of whom Josiah Conder, one of the great men of my smaller literary world at that time, wrote an appreciative biographical sketch. Mr. Pringle, let me remind my readers, was the original editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, a magazine which still maintains its reputation as being the best of its class. Mr. Pringle, I believe, at some time or other, had visited Wrentham; at any rate, the Stricklands, especially Susanna, were among his intimate friends, and, from what I heard, I could well believe, when, at a later period, I visited his grave in Bunhill Fields, what I found recorded there – that ‘In the walks of British literature he was known as a man of genius; in the domestic circle he was loved as an affectionate relative and faithful friend; in the wide sphere of humanity he was revered as the advocate and protector of the oppressed,’ who ‘left among the children of the African desert a memorial of his philanthropy, and bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen an example of enduring virtue.’ At the home of the Pringles the Stricklands made many literary acquaintances, such as Alaric Watts, and Mrs. S. C. Hall, and others of whom I heard them talk. At that time, however, literature was not, as far as women were concerned, the lucrative profession it has since become, and I have a dim remembrance of their paintings – for in this respect the Stricklands, like my own mother, were very accomplished – being sold at the Soho Bazaar, a practice which helped to maintain them in the respectability and comfort becoming their position in life. But in London they never forgot the old home, and wrote so much about it in their stories, that there was not a flower, or shrub, or tree, or hedge, or mossy bank redolent in early spring of primroses and violets, to which they had not given, to my boyish eyes, a glory and a charm. This reference to painting reminds me of a feature of my young days, not without interest, in connection with the name of Cunningham – a name at one time well known in the religious world.
The reader must be reminded that the reverend gentleman referred to was a rara avis, and that between him and the neighbouring clergy there was little sympathy – unless the common rallying cry of ‘The Church in Danger!’ was raised as an electioneering dodge. The clergyman at Wrentham at that time, who declared himself the appointed vessel of grace for the parish, I have been led to believe, since I have become older, was by no means a saint, and his brethren were notorious as evil-livers. Some twenty years ago one of them had his effects sold off, and his library was viewed with no little amusement by his parishioners, to many of whom, if popular fame be an authority, he was more than a spiritual father. The library contained only one book that could be called theological, and the title of that wonderfully unique volume was, ‘Die and be Damned; or, An End of the Methodists.’ All the other books were exclusively sporting, while the pictures were such as would have been a disgrace to Holywell Street. It was of him that the clerk said that ‘next Sunday there would be no Divine sarvice, as maaster was going to Newmarket.’ Once upon a time after a sermon one of his flock approached him, as he had been preaching on miracles, to ask him to explain what a miracle really was. The reverend gentleman gave his rustic inquirer a kick, adding, ‘Did you feel that?’
‘Oh yes, sir; but what of that?’
‘Why,’ said the reverend gentleman, ‘if you had not felt it, it would have been a miracle, that is all.’ Yet that man was as popular as any parson in the district, perhaps more so, and it was with some indignation in certain quarters that the people learned that a new Bishop had come to Norwich, and that the parson had been deprived of his living for immoral conduct. Of another it is said that, calling on a poor villager, dying and full of gloomy anticipations as to the future, all he could say was, ‘Don’t be frightened; I dare say you will meet a good many people you know.’ I have often heard old men talk of the time when they used to take the parson home in a wheelbarrow – but that was before we had a Sunday-school, at which I was a regular teacher. The church had a Sunday-school, but not till after the one in the chapel had existed many years. Of these ornaments of the Church and foes of Dissent, some had apparently a sense of shame – one of them, at any rate, committed suicide.
At Pakefield, some seven miles from Wrentham, and just on the borders of Lowestoft, then, as now, the most eastern extremity of England, resided the Rev. Francis Cunningham. He was a clergyman of piety and philanthropy, rare at that time in that benighted district, and in this respect he was aided by his wife, a little dark woman whom I well remember, a sister of the far-famed
