MR. MERIVALE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIC MEMORIES.*

"My unlucky ignorance as a man of business was to prove a very Aaron's serpent on the threshold of old age, and swallow up the whole in one sudden ruin at a moment's notice, through the default of a trusted friend and solicitor, and left me at sixty years to begin nothing in particular upon nothing at all." It is thus, with a blitheness worthy of Sheridan, that Mr. Merivale refers to a misfortune which would have reduced most men of his temperament and years to despair and silence. It has not, however, been a misfortune for the British public if it has been the cause, or one of the causes, of a most delightful book being published. We have no hesitation in saying that this volume, which contains only three hundred pages—short as literature of the kind goes—is the best work of the "miscellaneous reminiscences" order which has been published for at least a decade. It is written with ease, here and there almost carelessly, but never in a slap-dash style ; it is composed, in fact, of first-class arm-chair talk. It is eminently good-natured. Mr. Merivale has his dislikes—Buckle and Anthony Trollope, for example—but no hatreds. When he has a chance, he says a good word for a friend or contemporary who happens not to be a general favourite. Thus he goes slightly out of his way to say of Mr. Labouchere : "To this day his peculiar views and yet more peculiar way of putting them have made him a terror and a shaking of the head to a large section of the world, as doubtless to his uncle at the outset. But a more delightful companion, a quieter and more gentle soul, a more attractive host or kindlier mortal, might be looked for throughout the ranks of the accepted all in vain." Above all things, this book stands the teat applied by the late George Douglas Brown to works claiming to be good,—it is "pregnant and packed." It is literally true that there is not • Bar, Siam and Platform: Autobiographic Monories. By Herman Charles Nerivale. London ; Chatto and Windus. res.)

a dull page in these three hundred, not one that does not contain a happy phrase, a story that is good without being old, a deft characterisation, or an agreeable recollection.

Mr. Merivale accounts himself a man of three professions ; he entitles his book Bar, Stage, and Platform :— " I have been a Boundary Commissioner in Wales, a caucus in Sussex, a Chief Justice's Marshal with Matthew Arnold for my 2olleagne, a private secretary in Spain, and an egg merchant in

Clerkenwell I have been petted by Joanna Baillie, I have shuddered at Macready, I have listened to Macaulay I have been offered an Irish seat gratis by Parnell himself I have been invited to fight Bristol against Beach and Brighton against Marriott as a full-fledged 1880 lunatic. . . . . . I have written tragedy for Irving, comedy for Toole, melo- drama for Clayton, and burlesque for Hollingshead.

have listened to the philosophy of De Tocqueville, the repub- licanism of Louis Blanc, the omniscience of Buckle, and the metaphysical theories of Manning by hours at my father's table; I have edited and largely written that sound and wholesome work, the Annual Register.'

This imperfect list of Mr. Merivale's achievements is cal- culated to suggest old moralisings about "rolling stones" and the necessity for the "concentration of purpose" as a means towards the attainment of "success in life." Occa- sionally Mr. Merivale lets fall a word which would seem to indicate that he is aware such things have been said or may be said with truth. But he gently pleads that he has been " made " as he is. His many professions have given him that happiness which comes of a variety of experience absolutely untainted by the vulgar variety of Bohemianism. Besides, Mr. Merivale was singularly happy in his family, his relatives, his Harrow and Balliol acquaintanceship& His father was a man of such natural faculty that Bulwer Lytton considered him the equal of Macaulay. His son thinks he might have made his fortune had he gone to the Equity Bar. As it was, he became Permanent

Under-Secretary to the Colonies, and was greeted by Lord Palmerston when acting as locum tenens for Lord John Russell as Chief Secretary with : "In the first place, Mr. Men.

vale, where are the Colonies ? " At his father's table young Merivale met Cardinal Manning—who never came to dinner, but only to tea—Dean Stanley, and Lord Westbury. It was at the elder Merivale's table that Westbury said of the Judge's head that he "knew he had a pimple, but never heard it came to a head," and that Mr. Lyulph Stanley flatly contradicted a statement by Buckle about the last burning of a witch, and proved himself to be in the right by quoting chapter and verse. Mr. Merivale was as happy in his relatives and environment as Marcus Aurelius was,—or at least professed to be. One of his uncles .was Niebuhr's rival in erudition, Dean Merivale. The Dean was as fond of a joke as of scholarship :—

" An enterprising firm of publishers of the day guiltless of much discrimination asked Anthony Trollop° for a life of Julius Caesar, as part of a series. As a popular novelist he was good enough for them, though scholarship was not perhaps his strong point. He produced it at once, as he would produce anything asked for at so many words an hour, which by his own account was his method, to be ensued, he thought, by every author. He was much exercised in mind about Thackeray's lack of industry, as he said in his memoir, because there were so many hours when Thackeray wrote no words at all. They were not bad when they came, perhaps, on the whole. These publishers, no doubt, thought that the best man to deal with Julius Caisar at this hour of the day would be a writer of romance. Proud of his achievement in so new a line, Trollop°, an old friend of our family, at once sent a copy to my uncle, who replied, with placid brevity, 'Thank you for your comic history of Clesar.' Trollope wept."

Mr. Merivale is hard upon Trollope, no doubt, because

Thackeray was both his idol and his friend. He once took young Merivale and a Balliol chum to the Queen's Theatre and the New Cut after treating them to beefsteak and apricot

omelette at the Garrick Club. "As he bent his silver head over the dress circle a gentleman from above took aim at it, and

spat thereon. Thackeray had quiet recourse to his silk handkerchief without looking up: The gods are expectorating; there must be something wrong on earth.' " Very different from the Dean except in personal appearance was Uncle John, who "never did anything he could avoid, and in that way avoided a good deal," who "kept the very worst wine I ever drank," but was a good fellow all the same.

Mr. Merivale's theatrical reminiscences are, of course, among his best. Here we have a characteristically good appreciation of Charles Kean, and a picture: of him and his wife, who before marriage was Ellen Tree :—

" As a matter of fact, Charles Kean remains to me one of the most magnetic actors of my day. Magnetism can repel as well a, attract, so about him as about Irving, who has been gifted before all things with the same master quality, difference of opinion flourished very widely. With a short though well-knit figure and a plain face, none the less all his movements were free and elegant as became a captain of the Eton boats, and the face could assume expressions that made it charming. The smile was exquisite. The voice was harsh but clear and easily changed with pathos or with humour. His fencing was a sight to watch ; and in earlier days than I can remember, so good a judge as Sala could speak of his Prince of Denmark as the most tenderly romantic he had seen. He could lend even quite a singular charm to such a part as Evelyn in Money, and such a Shylock certainly I never saw. The grim humour, concentrated force, and in-

exorable purpose of the man never found a truer outlet How funny he was with her at rehearsals. Seek Mrs. Bead!' if anything went wrong. Oh Elled! Elled ! take that man out of the front rank and put him at the back ! His legs must not be seen. No no, my good man, it's not your fault, but we can't help these things. Oh Elled! Elled! I wanted a full-dress rehearsaL And the Archbishop of Canterbury has come without his bitre."

Among the later celebrities known to Mr. Merivale Matthew Arnold holds a foremost place :— " Matthew Arnold's was the most evenly cheerful disposition I have ever known, never in high spirits, as I remember him, and never in low ; with a vein of grave and scholarly humanity always in his talk with his children, showing itself in the tenderest and most equable of intimacies. Theirs was the ideal of a quiet and trusted home, I think, and a lesson in harmony to the less for-

tunate I saw him one day on the opposite side of the street pacing along and smiling to himself in the way I knew so well. Amused, I went across to him, and asked him what had happened. 'What is the fun ?' I said. Have they been attack- ing you again in the Saturday ?' For to break lances with that periodical was an amusement to both, Freeman, the historian, being reputed to be his adversary. Oh no, my dear boy, no! I went to Drury Lane last night.' 'Oh, to see Helen Faucit in Cynabeline ? Didn't you admire her ?' 40h, not that—poor dear lady '—in his inimitable longueurs which could not be described as a drawl= she was charming, of course. But it's the play, you know, Cymbelins. Such an odd, broken-backed sort of a thing. It couldn't have happened anywhere, you know."

This is a book which lends itself readily to quotation; indeed, quotation is the only effectual method of showing its varied excellences. To say that Mr. Merivale is never serious would be doing him an injustice. There is a touch of gentle pensiveness at least in the chapters in which he narrates some of his travels, and in one passage dealing with Dresden be attains spirituality throughout:—

" Through all the changes and charms of this mortal art, through all the churches and galleries of Madrid and Seville, of Florence and of Rome ; through the long miles of Louvre treasures and the fog-brown glooms of our own National Gallery; through Titian's and Tintoret's haunts in mournful Venice; through sculpture as through painting, and by the three Venuses one by one, the Capitol, the Medici, the Nib; through all the Titan power of Michael Angelo ; through all the daring realism of Velazquez; through Andrea del Santo's incom- parable tenderness and Fra Angelico's monastic fervour; through the quaint angularities and humour of the Flemish school, I have been haunted always and for ever by the memory of one pictured face, as first it broke upon my young ignorance in the shrine room set apart for it, throned as it should be, divine and all alone. The face of the Sistine Madonna, with that strange, unutterable, unearthly expression of a rapt and solemn awe—the awe of nothing but a chubby baby face, which none the less suggests behind it some supernatural trace of whence it came, made her my mistress in the Arts at once."

This book has one defect, but that is a serious one; it has no index. Considering the number of historical personalities dealt with in one way or another, the defect should be supplied

when a second edition of the book is called for.