Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/169

Rh hardly more than the third time I have spoken to her."

Mrs. Polwheedle, however, was in no hurry to leave, for she was again in conversation with the eminent personage.

"I hear that your Excellency is going to march to Banglepore. I am so pleased to think that my son will have an opportunity of coming under your Excellency's notice."

"Your son, Mrs. Polwheedle?" said his Excellency; "why, I understood the brigadier here to tell me that he had no ——"

"Oh no, not his son," said the lady, tapping the brigadier on the arm with her fan; "my son by the late Captain Jones of the 10th Fusiliers — my first husband, you know — Lieutenant Jones, of the Banglepore Rangers, — as promising a young officer as there is in the army, I can assure your Excellency. He has passed in the language; and I am sure your Excellency will find him deserving of any favour you may be pleased to show him."

 

 From The New Quarterly Review.

the neighbourhood of the picturesque village of Chertsey, close to which the Thames winds broad and clear between deep green meadow-flats and quiet woods, still stand the ruins of Newark Abbey. Situated in a lonely field, eight miles from the village, and near to the Weybridge canal, they lie comparatively unknown and little visited; a mill murmurs close at hand, turned by a small fall; and all around stretch the level fields and meadows of green Surrey. Here, at the beginning of the present century, when these ruins stood as now, a young man and maiden, betrothed to each other, were accustomed to meet and exchange their quiet vows; and here, half a century afterwards, a grey-haired old man of seventy, beautiful in his age as the old Goethe, would wander musing summer day after summer day. The lovers had been parted; the maiden had married and died young, while the man had also married and become the father of a household; but that first dream had never been forgotten by one at least of the pair, and that surviving one was Thomas Love Peacock, known to general English readers as the author of "Headlong Hall." With a constancy and a tenderness which many more famous men would have done well to emulate, he clung to the scene of his first and perhaps his only love: a love innocent, like all true love; and far preferable, to quote his own words, to —

"The waveless calm, the slumber of the dead, which weighs on the minds of those who have never loved, or never earnestly." Looking on the face of Peacock in his old age, and knowing his secret, well might one remember in emotion the beautiful words of Scribe: "I'll faut avoir aimé une fois en sa vie, non pour le moment où l'on aime, car on n'éprouve alors que de tourmens, des regrets, de la jalousie; mais peu à peu ces tourmens-la deviennent des souvenirs, qui charment notre arrière-saison. Et quand vous verrez la vieillesse douce, facile, et tolérante, vous puissez dire comme Fontenelle, 'L'amour a passé par-là!'"

Yes, Love had passed that way, and set on the old man his gracious seal, which no other deity can counterfeit; so that, looking upon the old man's face, one read of gentleness, high-mindedness, toleration, and perfect chivalry. These may seem odd words to apply to one whom the world knew rather as a retrograde philosopher and satirical pessimist rather than a lover of human nature, as a scholar rather than a poet, as a country gentleman of the old school rather than a humanitarian of the new: but they can be justified; and it may be questioned, moreover, whether he had not learned of the eighteenth century certain modest virtues which the nineteenth century has incontinently forgotten. That high-minded courtesy and noble deference towards women, which is now to be seen among thinkers and poets (so far as I know them) only in Robert Browning, was his in perfection. To children he was gentleness itself, and all children loved him; and there could be no prettier sight in the world than the picture of him, as I saw him first, and as in my mind's eye I see him now, silting one summer day, seated on his garden-lawn by the river, while a little maiden of sixteen rested on his knees the great quarto "Orlando Innamorata" of Bojardo, and following with her finger the sun-lit lines, read soft and low, corrected ever and anon by his kind voice, the delicate Italian he loved so well. Who that looked at him, then, could fail to perceive, to quote Lord