ful collection of beautiful and rare work, and where I expounded to Ruskin a little of the Japanese art, of which he knew absolutely nothing, as it is shown in their handicraft. Then we drove to the Bois... and at eight o'clock went to the Français to hear "Tartuffe" and "Le Barbier de Seville." ... It was not long after Norton's return from France that he was attacked by the illness which was the only unfortunate episode of the stay at Keston. A passage from a letter of Dickens to Mrs. Norton (November 5, 1868) illustrates his warm interest in the transplanted household: "I am indeed concerned to read your account of Mr. Norton's illness and to think of your own personal anxieties in a strange country, so far from home. Give him my affectionate love (keeping a large share of it for yourself) and tell him how truly my heart is with him and with you, and how grateful I shall be for better and further tidings of him." Other friends showed their affectionate kindness, in terms as genuine, if not so expressive, as those of Dickens's keenly sympathetic nature. The winter of 1868-1869 was spent in London. In Norton's letters of this time there are glimpses of the old and new friends he was meeting. To J. R. Lowell QUEEN'S GATE TERRACE, LONDON Browning, whom I have seen but once, seems to be the freshest, most ardent, and most unconven tionally individual man in society. We dined two days ago with the Leslie Stephens, meeting Tyndall, Froude, and Fitzjames Stephen. Tyndall lays himself out to charm the ladies, by dropping science and taking to sentiment, which he pours forth with a delicious breadth of Irish brogue, "Ah! the mountain tops, 't is there that man fales himself nearest the devine. I always sakes the mountain tops for relafe from the tile and care of the wurrld. Do ye remimber Emerson's poem of 'Monadnock'? Let me quote some lines with which me heart is in sympathy. (He quotes with true Celtic fervour.) Ye might not suspict it, but Emerson is me favourite poet. I was up this morning at six o'clock, and what book was me choice to begin the day wid but Emerson's poems. ..." Fitzjames Stephen 1 strikes me as the clearest- and strongest-minded man I have met here. He has a big frame and a big, solid head, and already wears the look of a Chief Justice or Lord Chancellor. There is a most satisfactory air about him of capacity for doing hard work easily. He is simple in manner without pretense, and without overbearingness. He talks well, and tells a good story with effect. Although intellectualized to a degree of hardness common among English, or rather London men who are much in society, he has a heart, and shows it now and then in a dash of humour in which sentiment if it be not present 1 [Sir] James Fitzjames Stephen, Leslie Stephen's older brother, who was then occupied with law and journalism in London. From 1869 to 1872 he served as legal member of Council for India; appointed to a judgeship in 1879. Author of A History of the Criminal Law of England, and other works. is at least implied. He is a great friend of Carlyle's, and walks with him often on Sunday afternoons. He says Carlyle is habitually in a state of very cheerful despondency, appropriate to the most wilfully dyspeptic man in Her Majesty's Dominions. He is growing old, and has to be humoured a good deal. He is more extravagant in talk than ever; but one would rather hear him talk for two hours than any other man in London, "and, besides, he is so kind, with a real hearty kindness," and he has I do not know how that sentence was to be finished, for Eliot came running into my room in breathless eagerness to take me to see a Punch who was performing in front of our windows. I take as great a delight in Punches as he does, and there are but few of them left. This is only the second that I have seen since we came to England, and it will not be many years before Punch disappears as a living character altogether, or will be supported only as the Stage Coach is, as a fancy by some rich fellow who does not know how to spend his money. Indeed as England grows richer and poorer, as riches collect together in a heap on one side, and poverty huddles together in a mass on the other, and there seems to be scarcely a passageway of communication between them, the old traditions and customs die out, and even fun and cheerfulness diminish till little is left of them. Charles Lamb's London, the London sights and shows of Hone's Every Day Book are almost wholly gone, and with them the great city has lost many of its best individual characteristics. ... |