MISS M. BETHAM-EDWARDS'S REMINISCENCES.* A WOMAN gifted with much shrewdness

of observation and experience of life, who is not without a sense of humour,

and is blessed with the pen of a ready writer, cannot fail in relating her memories of the past to produce an interesting volume. Miss Betham-Edwards has much to tell of rural life in Suffolk as she knew it many years ago, and her account of the morals and manners of the country people may occa- sionally remind the reader of the local pictures of the same county drawn by the poet Crabbe. In Suffolk, too, she has played her part as a farmer, but observes that it was not her vocation to go to market. "Mr. Hardy's 'Bathsheba,'" she writes, "has often made me and many others smile. Her presence on the corn market is quite at variance with experi- ence and the accepted order of things." Samples of corn in little paper bags were shown by neighbours or headman, and in the same way pigs and sheep were purchased and the fat stock sold. Whether the farm was a success or a failure the reader is not told. The death of the owner's sister and partner severed the last tie to Suffolk, and instead of selling butter and eggs Miss Edwards "made a sudden plunge into the intensest life of London, the life of letters." Before following her there, it may be well to note some of the author's recollections of bucolic life in Suffolk as it existed in her girlhood. The migration to London and other large cities had not begun, and "there was a lover and more to spare for every lass." The villager knew of nothing beyond his home. A London daily might reach hall or rectory, but one or two local weekly papers did duty in farmhouse, smithy, and shop:—

" Standards of conduct differed from those now in general acceptance. For instance, walking one day to Ipswich we met a labourer's wife and her two daughters, girls of twelve and four- teen. ' So, Mrs. P—,' said my eldest sister, 'you have been shopping.'—' No, Miss,' replied the good woman, with an unmis- takable air of self-approval, but I am anxious to do my girls all the good I can, so I have just taken them to see a man hanged.'" Readers who are old enough to have been nurtured on the edify- ing literature provided by Mrs. Sherwood will see nothing strange in this story, for they will remember how Mr. Fair- child took his family to see a man hanging in chains with a view to their spiritual benefit. Education was of small account in Miss Betham-Edwards's village. A little girl said that she got on nicely in the rudiments of reading," and this was probably all that could be learnt in the Dame's School. Two respectable schoolmistresses whom the author knew could just read and write and do easy sums. Pleasure-

taking throughout the year was confined to a travelling circus, a ploughing match, and a fair, and Miss Betham.Edwards observes that "a cheap tripper at Hastings, whether artisan or rustic, spends more on a single day's outing in 1897 than his forerunner, may be his forerunner's family, of fifty years ago on recreation from the cradle to the grave." On the other hand, but one criminal offence is remembered through- out a period of thirty years, and "there was no juvenile smoking, no poring over Penny Dreadfnls, no betting in our village at this time." Another good feature recorded of the farm labourers was their pride in their horses. In illustration of this feeling, the following pathetic story is related of a ploughman whose favourite horse had to be sold by auction :

"That sorrowful morning the man was up betimes, for the last time grooming the sturdy, gentle, intelligent creature. Then with a heavy heart he started. Had any miraculous intervention happened then, had some angel in human shape suddenly come that way, and learning or divining the story, pulled out his purse with the words, Here, good man, is gold. Yonder beast is your own,'—I feel sure he would never have borne the overjoy. Either his wits or his heart would have

• lieminucences. By M. Btabara-Edwards. Loudon : G. Rodway. Mal

given way under such unimaginable good fortune. Nothing of the kind happened, and I have seen moisture in the eyes of the rough, prosy farmers as they recounted the sequel. When the sale was over and John had to say good-bye to the loved com- panion of so many years, he put his arms round the animal's neck and kissed it, big tears rolling down the eyes of both. The horse wept, well understanding that the parting was final."

It is characteristic of the life led by Miss Betham-Edwards

in Suffolk that her earliest manuscript was despatched to London through the agency of the family grocer, and that

her books reached her in the butter-woman's cart.

In order to finish her education Miss Betham-Edwards was sent as a governess pupil to a school in Peckham, where she formed a close friendship with her cousin, the late Amelia Blandford Edwards, now known to fame as a novelist and Egyptologist. There was only one matter that disturbed this lifelong intercourse. Both ladies being novelists, and both having a second name with the same initial, literary failures or successes were constantly attributed to the wrong

author. "As Frances Power Cobbe wittily said, we had each a bee in our bonnets, a bee that at all times buzzed most uncomfortably, and sometimes gave a sting. It was a case of the two Dromios with change of sex and circumstance." In life and in death this second name, loved not wisely but too well, was the cause of confusion. Even a legacy went astray, and after the death of the Egyptologist Miss Edwards scared an acquaintance at the Hastings railway station, who drew back horrified as from an apparition. " she stammered forth, "I read in the papers that you were dead !"

In a chapter entitled "The World of Letters, Art, and Science," Miss Betham-Edwards mentions without attempting to describe "the historic conversaziones at George Eliot's, the hardly less historic breakfasts of the late Lord Houghton, and Madame Bodichon's cosmopolitan gatherings," but few men or women of mark are brought into prominence on her pages. Of her friend, and George Eliot's most intimate friend, Madame Bodichon, she has much to say, and nothing but what is pleasant. Visitors at the Priory thirty years ago will recall the clear blue eyes and bright, animated expression of the foundress of Girton,—a. striking contrast both in face and manners to the mistress of the house, whose soft, musical voice had in it something of sadness and solemnity. Before taking what Miss Edwards rightly calls the "perilous leap" which kr the most part cut George Eliot off from the society of her sex, she consulted her friend, and Madame Bodichon, feeling that she had no right to advise in such a case, replied "that her own heart must decide, and that no matter what her decision or its consequences should be," she would stand by her as long as she lived. There can be little doubt that there were times when George Eliot felt the need of her support. Miss Betham-Edwards thinks that the great novelist's deep-seated melancholy was not caused by her own life, but by the burden of the universe ; it is far more reasonable to suppose that it was due to both. The writer's intimacy with Lewes and George Eliot has not proved of much service to her volume of Reminiscences. No fresh light is thrown upon the character of either, and the incidents mentioned are of slight significance. We are told how when Madame Bodichon called one day at too early an hour, "her hostess, pale, trembling, dishevelled, a veritable Sibyl disturbed in the fine frenzy of inspiration," rushed out, exclaiming, "Oh, Barbara, Barbara! what have you done ? " and how at another time, in more tranquil mood, George Eliot "bent almost ecstatically over an exquisite flower," exclaiming "in her peculiar sighing voice, 'Why, oh, why not pray to such lovely things as these P " "There are moments," the author writes, "when all of us need Si little relaxation, a humdrum human laugh. This wonderful pair seldom enjoyed either. They longed to ride a hobby-horse, but found the pastime, I should say, accomplishment, unattain- able. I well remember a lament of George Henry Lewes on this subject. A bramble-bush reminds me of a friend more fortunate than myself,' he said. This learned fellow had a hobby, and his was brambles. One day he came to me with a radiant face. "I have at last found my bramble," he cried, alluding to a special kind that had hitherto eluded his search. How I envied that man !' In all probability a hobby-horse would have prolonged the lives of both metaphysician and novelist. Their intellects had no repose."

We may add that Miss Betham-Edwards had no acquaintance

with Lewes before 1868, when, though still full of animation, the immense vitality of his earlier days was lessened by an almost constant sense of physical discomfort. Some of the novelist's literary judgments will be regarded as peculiar. She delighted Lewes by her whole - hearted admiration of Felix Holt, thinking it as fine in its way as Illiddlemarch. She considers Robert Browning "a poet im- mensely inferior to his glorious wife," she holds that from some points of view Hawthorne is the greatest story-teller who ever lived, and that Goldsmith is "the greatest of great novelists." For Carlyle, "the apologist of brute force," Miss Betham-Edwards has no sympathy. When at Weimar in 1871 she met Dr. Wilson, a friend of Carlyle's, and from "the lips of this high-minded friend fell the most withering sarcasm ever uttered on Carlyle's system." The pair were holding earnest converse one day, when Dr. Wilson "turned to him sharply with the question Come now, my friend, answer me. Jesus Christ on the Cross now, do you call that success ? ' Carlyle was dumb." The retort is not new to us, nor probably to our readers ; and from this "high-minded friend" Miss Edwards also learnt, "long before the tragedy became so notorious," that Jane and Thomas Carlyle led a "oat and dog life."

The author observes that theology and theologians have never possessed the slightest attraction for her ; but she never loses an opportunity of sneering at the clergy, and it would almost seem as if a, minister of religion who had disgraced his calling were regarded by her as a god- send. When there is a scandal to tell, it is told with a com- prehensive regard to details, and her reference to a living and highly venerated Bishop is, to say the least, grossly lacking in good taste. It is not necessary to question the truth of one of the author's statements, in order to feel that the impression she desires to convey by them is a false one. Eccentric, muddle-headed, and bigoted clergymen do not exist solely in the novelist's pages, but they are no more representative of the Church of England than an ignorant and self-satisfied preacher is representative of Dissent. Dis- crimination, however, is not one of Miss Betham-Edwards's gifts, for she declares that she respects Nonconformity in any shape. Yet her respect apparently resembles that of Dr. Johnson's pious friend, who never entered a church, but always took his hat off on passing one ; for while, as she con- fesses, alienated from the Church of England, she is unattracted by "Nonconformist Chapel or Friends' Meeting House."