AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DEAN MERIVALE ON March 7, 18721. N this, the eve of my sixty-fourth birthday anniversary, it has occurred to me to put in writing, for the amusement of those who come after me, some record of my life and experience. I have been reminded more than once of late, by my own observation of myself, that I have arrived on the brink of the age of garrulity, when a man begins to think and talk a good deal, in season and sometimes out of season, of his personal affairs, of his tastes and judgments and reminiscences. But I trust I have not yet sunk into the stage when garrulity degenerates into twaddle; and it may be worth while, for the sake of those whom I love and who love me, to seize the interval, brief as it may be, and utilize it by making the few hasty notes which I purpose to inscribe in this little volume before me. My father's sixty-fourth anniversary was his last. He died April 25, 1844, a few months before completing his sixty-fifth year. He was in the last year of his life a hale and vigorous man, of burly port and figure, full of mental as well as bodily activity; he was capable of more physical exertion than I think I am now capable of myself; his mind was assuredly fresher Charles Merivale, Dean of Ely, the writer of these notes, was the second of twelve children, sons and B daughters of John Herman and and his interests more various and versatile than mine now are, or indeed ever were. He was taken without illness, without warning of any kind, by an apoplectic stroke; and if any adverse blow of that or any other kind were to befall me, I do not suppose that I have any greater strength and stamina to resist it than he had, but rather less; though I should add that he had suffered more than one serious illness in the course of his life, such as I have myself been wholly free from. I feel therefore that I hold my life in my hand; but I shall be content, more than content, to surrender it, whenever the good God who has thus far sustained me shall be pleased graciously to demand it. In the meanwhile I will bethink myself of leaving some trifling memorial of the life for which I have so much cause to be grateful. I may say, and I trust with some innocent satisfaction, that no man ever more exactly fulfilled the modest wishes and aspirations, in a worldly point of view, of the father to whom he owed his being, his education, and his putting forth in life, than by God's blessing I have been enabled to do. My father's views and hopes for me were not of the highest; but when he sent me to the University, having renounced for me the career of a writership in India, which I was prepared for, and on which I was about to enter with no unfavourable auspices, his warmest and brightest wish was that I should attain such University honours as would secure me a fellowship, that I should become a tutor in my College and make myself useful and more or less prominent during some years' residence therein, nor leave it till I had laid in a store of academic learning and achieved an academic reputation. He hoped that I might make myself well reputed in literature as a scholar or divine, and eventually earn for myself promotion to one of the higher dignities in the Church, to which his inclination and my own pointed for my profession. Such was the course of life which would have been his own dearest wish for himself, and such I have no doubt he would himself have realized, but for the circumstance of his being born of Presbyterian parents, and disqualified by his early training and prepossessions for the attainment of a University degree, and of the advantages and opportunities it would have opened to him. I believe, had it been otherwise, he would have been an ornament to the Church: he would have written histories, and declaimed sermons, and risen at least to a Deanery: but he would not have married at six and twenty, and whatever might have been eventually the issue of his loins, the actual I, myself I, should never have come into being. It pleased God otherwise. It became possible that I should be born into the world; and it has been so ordered that I have myself passed through precisely the career which, as I said, I believe my father might have enjoyed himself, and which I am very sure he most desired and very hopefully anticipated for me. If I have experienced my share of disappointments and mortifications in life, this accomplishment of my dear father's wishes for me may naturally afford me the most profound satisfaction, and gives me spirit to look forward to the kindly remembrance of my family.... I had proceeded no further than this point in my intended reminiscences1 when this little book was laid aside in a table drawer and forgotten or neglected. The loss of my eldest brother Herman 2 (Feb. 8, 1874) has been a great blow to me, and has deadened very much my interest in a personal career which through all my earlier years was linked with his every day and almost every hour, and in which I have been almost surprised to discover since he has gone how constantly I was wont to refer almost everything I did or said to what he would have done or said in the same circumstances. As time flows on new interests and new sympathies arise, and seem fully to occupy our thoughts and affections; but no intimacy, no identity of soul can ever again be that of brother with brother, while they are growing in body and mind together, observing life in common, learning with one another and from one another, and enjoying the unconscious 1 These notes were written at intervals between March 1872 and April 1880. 2 Herman, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. Merivale, born Nov. 8, 1806, died Feb. 8, 1874. He was educated at Harrow, and was head of the school in 1823; entered at Oriel College, Oxford, became a scholar of Trinity, first Ireland Scholar, Fellow of Balliol, and Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1831, and was a member of the Western Circuit. Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies (1847), and for India (1860). He married in 1834 Caroline Penelope, daughter of Rev. William Villiers Robinson. He was the author of various politico-economical and historical studies, besides contributions to the Edinburgh and other reviews. harmony of encouragement on the one hand and deference on the other. Recurring this day (Sept. 16, 1877) to the first pages of this little book, if book it ever becomes, I will begin by referring to some pleasing lines of Statius which I often recur to as singularly appropriate to my father's character and also to the end appointed him. 'Quid referam expositos servato pondere mores? Quae pietas? quam vile lucrum? quae cura pudoris? Non nimius; trinisque decem quinquennia lustris Sed te torpor iners, et mors imitata quietem, My father, like the parent whose loss Statius commemorates, was a man of great literary accomplishments, a good modern linguist, and an enthusiastic student of the most classical works in modern languages. He began life with an ardent desire for literary distinction, and to the last was a frequent writer both in prose and verse. He published three volumes of metrical compositions, chiefly translations, for his taste was rather imitative than original, and he was sensible, I am afraid too keenly sensible, that his performance fell far short of his lofty aims and aspirations. I have met with a notice in his friend the elder D'Israeli's Literary Character which I cannot but think is meant playfully to apply to him. 'I once heard an amiable author, whose literary career has perhaps not answered the fond hopes of youth, declare that he would retire to some solitude where, if any would follow him, he would found a new order of The Disappointed?? I was born at No. 14, East Street, Red Lion Square, on the 8th of March in the year 1808. My father had begun his married life between two and three years before, and was living as a struggling young barrister mostly on the allowance of his own and his wife's parents, picking up a few stray briefs and 1 Statius, Silvarum Lib. V. 3. 246. 2 Literary Character, vol. I. chap. 7. adding to his little gains by divers desultory contributions to the periodicals of the day. His means were scanty, and continued to be so for many years; but he had some future prospects which forbade him to despair during the period of his early efforts. The first nine years of my life were passed in this narrow and rather gloomy street, except when our residence was broken by an annual flitting for a lawyer's long vacation to my grandparents' homes in Devonshire. Some years ago I took some of my children to see the street in which their father had been born, and observing a notice of apartments to let in the windows of the well-remembered abode I knocked and entered. I found the house let off to a number of lodgers, evidently of a very humble class, with a bed, or beds, apparently in every room. I felt proud of my parents' brave spirit in enduring life, and enjoying it, in such mean quarters. But their home, I well know, was home to them. however homely. I can remember now the little dinners they gave; how carefully they decked out the rooms and dressed themselves for the occasion; and I have some recollection of various kind and witty and happy friends who made some of their 'Nights' Ambrosian and Attic 1. My father was engaged every day at 'chambers' in Lincoln's Inn. My mother kept the house in the true spirit of the admirable Hausfrau in Schiller's Song of the Bell. Her family increased rapidly, and five of us were first bred in this little domicile. She taught us all our first elements, and proud, dear soul, she was of her achievements as we all returned from school or college with more or less distinction. She was hard put to it for time to teach us, and still more for the means of giving us all the requisite daily exercise in the narrow little streets among which our abode was situated. My elder brother, Herman, and myself were trusted from the age of seven and six respectively to take our hoops into the sequestered recesses of Queen's Square, where a key of admission had been obtained for us; but we more commonly amused ourselves with playing on the pavement which surrounded the 1 Among these were Dr. Parr, John Murray, the elder Disraeli, Edmund Kean, and more particularly Mr. Merivale's old college friends and associates, Denman, Shadwell, and Horner. |