Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin...............................................................................................................................1

ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined to publish a selection of his various

papers; by way of introduction, the following pages were drawn up; and the whole, forming two considerable

volumes, has been issued in England. In the States, it has not been thought advisable to reproduce the whole;

and the memoir appearing alone, shorn of that other matter which was at once its occasion and its

justification, so large an account of a man so little known may seem to a stranger out of all proportion. But

Jenkin was a man much more remarkable than the mere bulk or merit of his work approves him. It was in the

world, in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude towards life, by his high moral value and

unwearied intellectual effort, that he struck the minds of his contemporaries. His was an individual figure,

such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in the pages of a novel. His was a face worth painting

for its own sake. If the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait, if Jenkin, after his death, shall not

The Jenkins of Stowting Fleeming's grandfather Mrs. Buckner's fortune Fleeming's father; goes to sea;

at St. Helena; meets King Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career The Campbell Jacksons

IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin, claiming to come from York, and bearing the

arms of Jenkin ap Philip of St. Melans, are found reputably settled in the county of Kent. Persons of strong

genealogical pinion pass from William Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, to his contemporary 'John

Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver General of the County,' and thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the

proper summit of any Cambrian pedigree a prince; 'Guaith Voeth, Lord of Cardigan,' the name and style of

him. It may suffice, however, for the present, that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from

Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and grew to wealth and consequence in their

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only was William Jenkin (as already

mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, but no less than twentythree times in the succeeding century and a

half, a Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the same place of humble honour. Of their wealth

we know that in the reign of Charles I., Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once in the market buying

land, and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor of Stowting Court. This was an estate of some 320 acres, six

miles from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe of Shipway, held of the Crown

IN CAPITE by the service of six men and a constable to defend the passage of the sea at Sandgate. It had a

chequered history before it fell into the hands of Thomas of Eythorne, having been sold and given from one

to another to the Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys, Trivets, Cliffords, Wenlocks,

Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes: a piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to

be no man's home. But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the Jenkin family in Kent; and though

passed on from brother to brother, held in shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by debts and

jointures, and at least once sold and bought in again, it remains to this day in the hands of the direct line. It is

not my design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to give a history of this obscure family. But this is an age

when genealogy has taken a new lease of life, and become for the first time a human science; so that we no

longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and

as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do our character and

talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our life's story

unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the

family. From this point of view I ask the reader's leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man who was my

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of 'Westward Ho!' was born in 1727, and

married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long

enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk themselves in all but name; and with

the Frewens in particular their connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended in

the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and brother to Accepted Frewen,

Archbishop of York. John's mother had married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication

was to be added by the Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner, ViceAdmiral of the White, who

was twice married, first to a paternal cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's

wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs. Buckner in mind; it was by means

of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any

Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs.

John, thus exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age 'a great genealogist of all Sussex families,

and much consulted.' The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem to have been interchangeable at will;

and yet Fate proceeds with such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name that the family was

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and unpractical sons. The eldest,

Stephen, entered the Church and held the living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme

example of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and jocular; fond of his garden,

which produced under his care the finest fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all the family, very choice in

horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle horse, Captain (for the names of horses are piously

preserved in the family chronicle which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as the vicar's foot

was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in the nine miles between Northiam and the

Vicarage door. Debt was the man's proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his church;

and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At an early age this unconventional parson

married his cook, and by her he had two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died unmarried; the

other imitated her father, and married 'imprudently.' The son, still more gallantly continuing the tradition,

entered the army, loaded himself with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was lost on

the Dogger Bank in the warship MINOTAUR. If he did not marry below him, like his father, his sister, and

The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post Office, followed in all material points

the example of Stephen, married 'not very creditably,' and spent all the money he could lay his hands on. He

died without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak intellect and feeble health, and the fifth

brother, William, whose brief career as one of Mrs. Buckner's satellites will fall to be considered later on. So

soon, then, as the MINOTAUR had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting and the line of the Jenkin family

Facility and selfindulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by these imprudent marriages) being at

once their quality and their defect; but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness both

of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a virtue, and we find him in consequence the

drudge and milkcow of his relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt both salt

water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as I can make out, to the land service. Stephen's

son had been a soldier; William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy Braddock's in

America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an estate on the James River, called, after the

parental seat; of which I should like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was probably by the influence of

Captain Buckner, already connected with the family by his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind

in the direction of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the PROTHEE, 64, that the lad made his only

campaign. It was in the days of Rodney's war, when the PROTHEE, we read, captured two large privateers to

windward of Barbadoes, and was 'materially and distinguishedly engaged' in both the actions with De Grasse.

While at sea Charles kept a journal, and made strange archaic pilotbook sketches, part plan, part elevation,

some of which survive for the amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of surveying, so that here we may

perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of Fleeming's education as an engineer. What is still more strange,

among the relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gunroom of the PROTHEE, I find a code

of signals graphically represented, for all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from scurvy, received his mother's orders to

retire; and he was not the man to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned

farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and we find him married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of

some fortune, the daughter of a London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive, galloping

about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to

Charles; one or other, it must have been; and the sailor farmer settled at Stowting, with his wife, his mother,

his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John. Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted,

three were in his own house, and two others (the horseleeches, Stephen and Thomas) he appears to have

continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom. He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous

horses, Maggie and Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. 'Lord Rokeby, his neighbour, called him

kinsman,' writes my artless chronicler, 'and altogether life was very cheery.' At Stowting his three sons, John,

Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all born to him; and the reader should

here be told that it is through the report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has been looking on at

In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a fallacious lady already mentioned,

Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs. John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the

Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod, and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she

was denied issue in both beds, and being very rich she died worth about 60,000L., mostly in land she was

in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung before successive members of the Jenkin family

until her death in 1825, when it dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy. The

grandniece, Stephen's daughter, the one who had not 'married imprudently,' appears to have been the first; for

she was taken abroad by the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next she adopted William,

the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad with her it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut

up with him in Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and got him a place in the King's

BodyGuard, where he attracted the notice of George III. by his proficiency in German. In 1797, being on

guard at St. James's Palace, William took a cold which carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more left

heirless. Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a kindness for his old midshipman, perhaps

pleased by the good looks and the good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon

Charles Jenkin. He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to be the chief hand in a somewhat wild

scheme of family farming. Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs. Buckner, 570, some

at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various

scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole farm amounted to near upon a thousand acres,

and was scattered over thirty miles of country. The exseaman of thirtynine, on whose wisdom and ubiquity

the scheme depended, was to live in the meanwhile without care or fear. He was to check himself in nothing;

his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless brothers, were to be indulged in comfort; and whether

the year quite paid itself or not, whether successive years left accumulated savings or only a growing deficit,

On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to Church House, Northiam: Charles the second,

then a child of three, among the number. Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of the life that

followed: of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up from Windsor in a coach and six, two posthorses and

their own four; of the house full of visitors, the great roasts at the fire, the tables in the servants' hall laid for

thirty or forty for a month together; of the daily press of neighbours, many of whom, Frewens, Lords,

Bishops, Batchellors, and Dynes, were also kinsfolk; and the parties 'under the great spreading chestnuts of

the old fore court,' where the young people danced and made merry to the music of the village band. Or

perhaps, in the depth of winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they would ride the

thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the snow to the pony's saddle girths, and be received by the

This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and goings of the golden aunt, was well qualified to

relax the fibre of the lads. John, the heir, a yeoman and a foxhunter, 'loud and notorious with his whip and

spurs,' settled down into a kind of Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the shoes of his father and his aunt. Thomas

Frewen, the youngest, is briefly dismissed as 'a handsome beau'; but he had the merit or the good fortune to

become a doctor of medicine, so that when the crash came he was not emptyhanded for the war of life.

Charles, at the dayschool of Northiam, grew so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became

matter of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon that tall, roughvoiced, formidable

uncle entered with the lad into a covenant: every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the Admiral a

penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be reversed. 'I recollect,' writes Charles, 'going crying to

my mother to be taken to the Admiral to pay my debt.' It would seem by these terms the speculation was a

losing one; yet it is probable it paid indirectly by bringing the boy under remark. The Admiral was no enemy

to dunces; he loved courage, and Charles, while yet little more than a baby, would ride the great horse into

the pond. Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of a fine sailor; and at an early period the name of

From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye, where the master took 'infinite delight'

in strapping him. 'It keeps me warm and makes you grow,' he used to say. And the stripes were not altogether

wasted, for the dunce, though still very 'raw,' made progress with his studies. It was known, moreover, that he

was going to sea, always a ground of preeminence with schoolboys; and in his case the glory was not

altogether future, it wore a present form when he came driving to Rye behind four horses in the same carriage

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace.

The Bishop had heard from his brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an order from

Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the

Admiral patted him on the head and said, 'Charles will restore the old family'; by which I gather with some

surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam and golden hope of my aunt's fortune, the family

was supposed to stand in need of restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all to

those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and Thomas must have always given matter

What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in which he found himself at Portsmouth,

his visits home, with their gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor,

where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at Lord Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the

LevesonGowers, he began to have 'bumptious notions,' and his head was 'somewhat turned with fine

people'; as to some extent it remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.

In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the CONQUEROR, Captain Davie, humorously known as

Gentle Johnnie. The captain had earned this name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in

the pages of Marryat: 'Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give him another dozen!' survives as a specimen of

his commands; and the men were often punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this

disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billyboat from Sheerness in December, 1816: Charles

with an outfit suitable to his pretensions, a twentyguinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which were

ordered into the care of the gunner. 'The old clerks and mates,' he writes, 'used to laugh and jeer me for

joining the ship in a billy boat, and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish

THE CONQUEROR carried the flag of ViceAdmiral Plampin, commanding at the Cape and St. Helena; and

at that allimportant islet, in July, 1817, she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm. Thus it befel that

Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of the French wars, played a small part in the dreary and

disgraceful afterpiece of St. Helena. Life on the guardship was onerous and irksome. The anchor was never

lifted, sail never made, the great guns were silent; none was allowed on shore except on duty; all day the

movements of the imperial captive were signalled to and fro; all night the boats rowed guard around the

accessible portions of the coast. This prolonged stagnation and petty watchfulness in what Napoleon himself

called that 'unchristian' climate, told cruelly on the health of the ship's company. In eighteen months,

according to O'Meara, the CONQUEROR had lost one hundred and ten men and invalided home one hundred

and seven, being more than a third of her complement. It does not seem that our young midshipman so much

as once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other ways Jenkin was more fortunate than some of his comrades.

He drew in watercolour; not so badly as his father, yet ill enough; and this art was so rare aboard the

CONQUEROR that even his humble proficiency marked him out and procured him some alleviations.

Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and here he had young Jenkin staying with him to

make sketches of the historic house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a strange notion of the

arts in our old English Navy. Yet it was again as an artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and

apparently for a second outing in a tengun brig. These, and a cruise of six weeks to windward of the island

undertaken by the CONQUEROR herself in quest of health, were the only breaks in three years of murderous

inaction; and at the end of that period Jenkin was invalided home, having 'lost his health entirely.'

As he left the deck of the guardship the historic part of his career came to an end. For fortytwo years he

continued to serve his country obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for inconspicuous and honourable

services, but denied any opportunity of serious distinction. He was first two years in the LARNE, Captain

Tait, hunting pirates and keeping a watch on the Turkish and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago. Captain

Tait was a favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands King Tom as he

was called who frequently took passage in the LARNE. King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean,

and was a terror to the officers of the watch. He would come on deck at night; and with his broad Scotch

accent, 'Well, sir,' he would say, 'what depth of water have ye? Well now, sound; and ye'll just find so or so

many fathoms,' as the case might be; and the obnoxious passenger was generally right. On one occasion, as

the ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas came up the hatchway and cast his eyes towards the gallows.

'Bangham' Charles Jenkin heard him say to his aidedecamp, Lord Bangham 'where the devil is that

other chap? I left four fellows hanging there; now I can only see three. Mind there is another there

tomorrow.' And sure enough there was another Greek dangling the next day. 'Captain Hamilton, of the

CAMBRIAN, kept the Greeks in order afloat,' writes my author, 'and King Tom ashore.'

From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities was in the West Indies, where he was

engaged off and on till 1844, now as a subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out pirates, 'then very

notorious' in the Leeward Islands, cruising after slavers, or carrying dollars and provisions for the

Government. While yet a midshipman, he accompanied Mr. Cockburn to Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar.

In the brigantine GRIFFON, which he commanded in his last years in the West Indies, he carried aid to

Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice earned the thanks of Government: once for an expedition to

Nicaragua to extort, under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money due to certain British

merchants; and once during an insurrection in San Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous

imprisonment and the recovery of a 'chest of money' of which they had been robbed. Once, on the other hand,

he earned his share of public censure. This was in 1837, when he commanded the ROMNEY lying in the

inner harbour of Havannah. The ROMNEY was in no proper sense a manofwar; she was a slavehulk, the

bonded warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where negroes, captured out of slavers under Spanish

colours, were detained provisionally, till the Commission should decide upon their case and either set them

free or bind them to apprenticeship. To this ship, already an eyesore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made

his escape. The position was invidious; on one side were the tradition of the British flag and the state of

public sentiment at home; on the other, the certainty that if the slave were kept, the ROMNEY would be

ordered at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed Commission compromised. Without

consultation with any other officer, Captain Jenkin (then lieutenant) returned the man to shore and took the

CaptainGeneral's receipt. Lord Palmerston approved his course; but the zealots of the antislave trade

movement (never to be named without respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty nine years later, the

matter was again canvassed in Parliament, and Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin defended by Admiral

In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral Pigot's flag captain in the Cove of Cork,

where there were some thirty pennants; and about the same time, closed his career by an act of personal

bravery. He had proceeded with his boats to the help of a merchant vessel, whose cargo of combustibles had

taken fire and was smouldering under hatches; his sailors were in the hold, where the fumes were already

heavy, and Jenkin was on deck directing operations, when he found his orders were no longer answered from

below: he jumped down without hesitation and slung up several insensible men with his own hand. For this

act, he received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a sense of his gallantry; and pretty soon

after was promoted Commander, superseded, and could never again obtain employment.

In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell

Jackson, who introduced him to his family in Jamaica. The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson, Custos

Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to be originally Scotch; and on the mother's side,

counted kinship with some of the Forbeses. The mother was Susan Campbell, one of the Campbells of

Auchenbreck. Her father Colin, a merchant in Greenock, is said to have been the heir to both the estate and

the baronetcy; he claimed neither, which casts a doubt upon the fact, but he had pride enough himself, and

taught enough pride to his family, for any station or descent in Christendom. He had four daughters. One

married an Edinburgh writer, as I have it on a first account a minister, according to another a man at least

of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of Auchenbreck; and the erring one was

instantly discarded. Another married an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the tale) she had

seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps be regarded rather as a measure of the family annoyance,

than a mirror of the facts. The marriage was not in itself unhappy; Adcock was a gentleman by birth and

made a good husband; the family reasonably prospered, and one of the daughters married no less a man than

Clarkson Stanfield. But by the father, and the two remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions and a

truly Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented. For long the sisters lived estranged then, Mrs.

Jackson and Mrs. Adcock were reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the name of Mrs.

Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister's lips, until the morning when she announced: 'Mary

Adcock is dead; I saw her in her shroud last night.' Second sight was hereditary in the house; and sure

enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock had passed away. Thus, of the four daughters,

two had, according to the idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the others

supported the honour of the family with a better grace, and married West Indian magnates of whom, I

believe, the world has never heard and would not care to hear: So strange a thing is this hereditary pride. Of

Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's grandfather, I know naught. His wife, as I have said, was

a woman of fierce passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them with her own hand; and

her conduct to her wild and downgoing sons, was a mixture of almost insane selfsacrifice and wholly

insane violence of temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of the sons went utterly to ruin, and

reduced their mother to poverty. The third went to India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly from the

knowledge of his relatives that he was thought to be long dead. Years later, when his sister was living in

Genoa, a red bearded man of great strength and stature, tanned by years in India, and his hands covered with

barbaric gems, entered the room unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted her from her seat, and

kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned out of a past that was never very clearly understood, with the

rank of general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and next his heart, the daguerreotype

The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla, became the wife of the midshipman Charles, and

the mother of the subject of this notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts and courage. Not

beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of seeming so; played the part of a belle in society, while far

lovelier women were left unattended; and up to old age had much of both the exigency and the charm that

mark that character. She drew naturally, for she had no training, with unusual skill; and it was from her, and

not from the two naval artists, that Fleeming inherited his eye and hand. She played on the harp and sang with

something beyond the talent of an amateur. At the age of seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire

of youthful enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without introduction, found her way into the

presence of the PRIMA DONNA and begged for lessons. Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she had done,

and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in the hands of a friend. Nor was this all, for when Pasta

returned to Paris, she sent for the girl (once at least) to test her progress. But Mrs. Jenkin's talents were not so

remarkable as her fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art for which she had no natural taste (the art

of literature) that she appeared before the public. Her novels, though they attained and merited a certain

popularity both in France and England, are a measure only of her courage. They were a task, not a beloved

task; they were written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end. In the least thing as well as in

the greatest, in every province of life as well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of taking

infinite pains, which descended to her son. When she was about forty (as near as her age was known) she lost

her voice; set herself at once to learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and attained to such proficiency

that her collaboration in chamber music was courted by professionals. And more than twenty years later, the

old lady might have been seen dauntlessly beginning the study of Hebrew. This is the more ethereal part of

courage; nor was she wanting in the more material. Once when a neighbouring groom, a married man, had

seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin mounted her horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the man

How a match came about between this talented and spirited girl and the young midshipman, is not very I easy

to conceive. Charles Jenkin was one of the finest creatures breathing; loyalty, devotion, simple natural piety,

boyish cheerfulness, tender and manly sentiment in the old sailor fashion, were in him inherent and

inextinguishable either by age, suffering, or injustice. He looked, as he was, every inch a gentleman; he must

have been everywhere notable, even among handsome men, both for his face and his gallant bearing; not so

much that of a sailor, you would have said, as like one of those gentle and graceful soldiers that, to this day,

are the most pleasant of Englishmen to see. But though he was in these ways noble, the dunce scholar of

Northiam was to the end no genius. Upon all points that a man must understand to be a gentleman, to be

upright, gallant, affectionate and dead to self, Captain Jenkin was more knowing than one among a thousand;

outside of that, his mind was very largely blank. He had indeed a simplicity that came near to vacancy; and in

the first forty years of his married life, this want grew more accentuated. In both families imprudent

marriages had been the rule; but neither Jenkin nor Campbell had ever entered into a more unequal union. It

was the captain's good looks, we may suppose, that gained for him this elevation; and in some ways and for

many years of his life, he had to pay the penalty. His wife, impatient of his incapacity and surrounded by

brilliant friends, used him with a certain contempt. She was the managing partner; the life was hers, not his;

after his retirement they lived much abroad, where the poor captain, who could never learn any language but

his own, sat in the corner mumchance; and even his son, carried away by his bright mother, did not recognise

for long the treasures of simple chivalry that lay buried in the heart of his father. Yet it would be an error to

regard this marriage as unfortunate. It not only lasted long enough to justify itself in a beautiful and touching

epilogue, but it gave to the world the scientific work and what (while time was) were of far greater value, the

delightful qualities of Fleeming Jenkin. The KentishWelsh family, facile, extravagant, generous to a fault

and far from brilliant, had given the father, an extreme example of its humble virtues. On the other side, the

wild, cruel, proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell Jacksons, had put forth, in the

The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823, the bubble of the Golden Aunt's inheritance had burst. She died

holding the hand of the nephew she had so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down and seemed to

bless him, surely with some remorseful feeling; for when the will was opened, there was not found so much

as the mention of his name. He was deeply in debt; in debt even to the estate of his deceiver, so that he had to

sell a piece of land to clear himself. 'My dear boy,' he said to Charles, 'there will be nothing left for you. I am

a ruined man.' And here follows for me the strangest part of this story. From the death of the treacherous

aunt, Charles Jenkin, senior, had still some nine years to live; it was perhaps too late for him to turn to saving,

and perhaps his affairs were past restoration. But his family at least had all this while to prepare; they were

still young men, and knew what they had to look for at their father's death; and yet when that happened in

September, 1831, the heir was still apathetically waiting. Poor John, the days of his whips and spurs, and

Yeomanry dinners, were quite over; and with that incredible softness of the Jenkin nature, he settled down for

the rest of a long life, into something not far removed above a peasant. The mill farm at Stowting had been

saved out of the wreck; and here he built himself a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends meet

with rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road and not at all abashed at his employment.

In dress, voice, and manner, he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care for appearances,

the least regret for the past or discontentment with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic

cheerfulness, announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was yet well pleased to go. One would think

there was little active virtue to be inherited from such a race; and yet in this same voluntary peasant, the

special gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already half developed. The old man to the end was perpetually

inventing; his strange, illspelled, unpunctuated correspondence is full (when he does not drop into cookery

receipts) of pumps, road engines, steamdiggers, steamploughs, and steamthreshing machines; and I have

it on Fleeming's word that what he did was full of ingenuity only, as if by some cross destiny, useless.

These disappointments he not only took with imperturbable good humour, but rejoiced with a particular relish

over his nephew's success in the same field. 'I glory in the professor,' he wrote to his brother; and to Fleeming

himself, with a touch of simple drollery, 'I was much pleased with your lecture, but why did you hit me so

hard with Conisure's' (connoisseur's, QUASI amateur's) 'engineering? Oh, what presumption! either of you

or MYself!' A quaint, pathetic figure, this of uncle John, with his dung cart and his inventions; and the

romantic fancy of his Mexican house; and his craze about the Lost Tribes which seemed to the worthy man

the key of all perplexities; and his quiet conscience, looking back on a life not altogether vain, for he was a

good son to his father while his father lived, and when evil days approached, he had proved himself a

It followed from John's inertia, that the duty of winding up the estate fell into the hands of Charles. He

managed it with no more skill than might be expected of a sailor ashore, saved a bare livelihood for John and

nothing for the rest. Eight months later, he married Miss Jackson; and with her money, bought in some two

thirds of Stowting. In the beginning of the little family history which I have been following to so great an

extent, the Captain mentions, with a delightful pride: 'A Court Baron and Court Leet are regularly held by the

Lady of the Manor, Mrs. Henrietta Camilla Jenkin'; and indeed the pleasure of so describing his wife, was the

most solid benefit of the investment; for the purchase was heavily encumbered and paid them nothing till

some years before their death. In the meanwhile, the Jackson family also, what with wild sons, an indulgent

mother and the impending emancipation of the slaves, was moving nearer and nearer to beggary; and thus of

two doomed and declining houses, the subject of this memoir was born, heir to an estate and to no money, yet

Birth and Childhood Edinburgh FrankfortontheMain Paris The Revolution of 1848 The

Insurrection Flight to Italy Sympathy with Italy The Insurrection in Genoa A Student in Genoa The

HENRY CHARLES FLEEMING JENKIN (Fleeming, pronounced Flemming, to his friends and family) was

born in a Government building on the coast of Kent, near Dungeness, where his father was serving at the time

in the Coastguard, on March 25, 1833, and named after Admiral Fleeming, one of his father's protectors in

His childhood was vagrant like his life. Once he was left in the care of his grandmother Jackson, while Mrs.

Jenkin sailed in her husband's ship and stayed a year at the Havannah. The tragic woman was besides from

time to time a member of the family she was in distress of mind and reduced in fortune by the misconduct of

her sons; her destitution and solitude made it a recurring duty to receive her, her violence continually

enforced fresh separations. In her passion of a disappointed mother, she was a fit object of pity; but her

grandson, who heard her load his own mother with cruel insults and reproaches, conceived for her an

indignant and impatient hatred, for which he blamed himself in later life. It is strange from this point of view

to see his childish letters to Mrs. Jackson; and to think that a man, distinguished above all by stubborn

truthfulness, should have been brought up to such dissimulation. But this is of course unavoidable in life; it

did no harm to Jenkin; and whether he got harm or benefit from a so early acquaintance with violent and

hateful scenes, is more than I can guess. The experience, at least, was formative; and in judging his character

it should not be forgotten. But Mrs. Jackson was not the only stranger in their gates; the Captain's sister, Aunt

Anna Jenkin, lived with them until her death; she had all the Jenkin beauty of countenance, though she was

unhappily deformed in body and of frail health; and she even excelled her gentle and ineffectual family in all

amiable qualities. So that each of the two races from which Fleeming sprang, had an outpost by his very

cradle; the one he instinctively loved, the other hated; and the lifelong war in his members had begun thus

We can trace the family from one country place to another in the south of Scotland; where the child learned

his taste for sport by riding home the pony from the moors. Before he was nine he could write such a passage

as this about a Hallowe'en observance: 'I pulled a middlingsized cabbagerunt with a pretty sum of gold

about it. No witches would run after me when I was sowing my hempseed this year; my nuts blazed away

together very comfortably to the end of their lives, and when mamma put hers in which were meant for

herself and papa they blazed away in the like manner.' Before he was ten he could write, with a really

irritating precocity, that he had been 'making some pictures from a book called "Les Francais peints par

euxmemes." . . . It is full of pictures of all classes, with a description of each in French. The pictures are a

little caricatured, but not much.' Doubtless this was only an echo from his mother, but it shows the

atmosphere in which he breathed. It must have been a good change for this art critic to be the playmate of

Mary Macdonald, their gardener's daughter at Barjarg, and to sup with her family on potatoes and milk; and

Fleeming himself attached some value to this early and friendly experience of another class.

His education, in the formal sense, began at Jedburgh. Thence he went to the Edinburgh Academy, where he

was the classmate of Tait and Clerk Maxwell, bore away many prizes, and was once unjustly flogged by

Rector Williams. He used to insist that all his bad schoolfellows had died early, a belief amusingly

characteristic of the man's consistent optimism. In 1846 the mother and son proceeded to

FrankfortontheMain, where they were soon joined by the father, now reduced to inaction and to play

something like third fiddle in his narrow household. The emancipation of the slaves had deprived them of

their last resource beyond the halfpay of a captain; and life abroad was not only desirable for the sake of

Fleeming's education, it was almost enforced by reasons of economy. But it was, no doubt, somewhat hard

upon the captain. Certainly that perennial boy found a companion in his son; they were both active and eager,

both willing to be amused, both young, if not in years, then in character. They went out together on

excursions and sketched old castles, sitting side by side; they had an angry rivalry in walking, doubtless

equally sincere upon both sides; and indeed we may say that Fleeming was exceptionally favoured, and that

no boy had ever a companion more innocent, engaging, gay, and airy. But although in this case it would be

easy to exaggerate its import, yet, in the Jenkin family also, the tragedy of the generations was proceeding,

and the child was growing out of his father's knowledge. His artistic aptitude was of a different order.

Already he had his quick sight of many sides of life; he already overflowed with distinctions and

generalisations, contrasting the dramatic art and national character of England, Germany, Italy, and France. If

he were dull, he would write stories and poems. 'I have written,' he says at thirteen, 'a very long story in

heroic measure, 300 lines, and another Scotch story and innumerable bits of poetry'; and at the same age he

had not only a keen feeling for scenery, but could do something with his pen to call it up. I feel I do always

less than justice to the delightful memory of Captain Jenkin; but with a lad of this character, cutting the teeth

The family removed in 1847 to Paris, where Fleeming was put to school under one Deluc. There he learned

French, and (if the captain is right) first began to show a taste for mathematics. But a far more important

teacher than Deluc was at hand; the year 1848, so momentous for Europe, was momentous also for

Fleeming's character. The family politics were Liberal; Mrs. Jenkin, generous before all things, was sure to be

upon the side of exiles; and in the house of a Paris friend of hers, Mrs. Turner already known to fame as

Shelley's Cornelia de Boinville Fleeming saw and heard such men as Manin, Gioberti, and the Ruffinis. He

was thus prepared to sympathise with revolution; and when the hour came, and he found himself in the midst

of stirring and influential events, the lad's whole character was moved. He corresponded at that time with a

young Edinburgh friend, one Frank Scott; and I am here going to draw somewhat largely on this boyish

correspondence. It gives us at once a picture of the Revolution and a portrait of Jenkin at fifteen; not so

different (his friends will think) from the Jenkin of the end boyish, simple, opinionated, delighting in

'When at 7 o'clock today I went out, I met a large band going round the streets, calling on the inhabitants to

illuminate their houses, and bearing torches. This was all very good fun, and everybody was delighted; but as

they stopped rather long and were rather turbulent in the Place de la Madeleine, near where we live' [in the

Rue Caumartin] 'a squadron of dragoons came up, formed, and charged at a handgallop. This was a very

pretty sight; the crowd was not too thick, so they easily got away; and the dragoons only gave blows with the

back of the sword, which hurt but did not wound. I was as close to them as I am now to the other side of the

table; it was rather impressive, however. At the second charge they rode on the pavement and knocked the

torches out of the fellows' hands; rather a shame, too wouldn't be stood in England. . . .

[At] 'ten minutes to ten . . . I went a long way along the Boulevards, passing by the office of Foreign Affairs,

where Guizot lives, and where tonight there were about a thousand troops protecting him from the fury of

the populace. After this was passed, the number of the people thickened, till about half a mile further on, I

met a troop of vagabonds, the wildest vagabonds in the world Paris vagabonds, well armed, having

probably broken into gunsmiths' shops and taken the guns and swords. They were about a hundred. These

were followed by about a thousand (I am rather diminishing than exaggerating numbers all through),

indifferently armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc. An uncountable troop of gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers'

wives (Paris women dare anything), ladies' maids, common women in fact, a crowd of all classes, though

by far the greater number were of the better dressed class followed. Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the mob

in front chanting the "MARSEILLAISE," the national war hymn, grave and powerful, sweetened by the night

air though night in these splendid streets was turned into day, every window was filled with lamps, dim

torches were tossing in the crowd . . . for Guizot has late this night given in his resignation, and this was an

'I and my father had turned with the crowd, and were close behind the second troop of vagabonds. Joy was on

every face. I remarked to papa that "I would not have missed the scene for anything, I might never see such a

splendid one," when PLONG went one shot every face went pale RRRRR went the whole

detachment, [and] the whole crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut. Such a scene! ladies,

gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but tripped up; and those that went down

could not rise, they were trampled over. . . . I ran a short time straight on and did not fall, then turned down a

side street, ran fifty yards and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa, did not see him; so walked on quickly,

giving the news as I went.' [It appears, from another letter, the boy was the first to carry word of the firing to

the Rue St. Honore; and that his news wherever he brought it was received with hurrahs. It was an odd

entrance upon life for a little English lad, thus to play the part of rumour in such a crisis of the history of

'But now a new fear came over me. I had little doubt but my papa was safe, but my fear was that he should

arrive at home before me and tell the story; in that case I knew my mamma would go half mad with fright, so

on I went as quick as possible. I heard no more discharges. When I got half way home, I found my way

blocked up by troops. That way or the Boulevards I must pass. In the Boulevards they were fighting, and I

was afraid all other passages might be blocked up . . . and I should have to sleep in a hotel in that case, and

then my mamma however, after a long DETOUR, I found a passage and ran home, and in our street joined

'. . . I'll tell you tomorrow the other facts gathered from newspapers and papa. . . . Tonight I have given you

what I have seen with my own eyes an hour ago, and began trembling with excitement and fear. If I have

'It was that fire raised the people. There was fighting all through the night in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette,

on the Boulevards where they had been shot at, and at the Porte St. Denis. At ten o'clock, they resigned the

house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (where the disastrous volley was fired) to the people, who

immediately took possession of it. I went to school, but [was] hardly there when the row in that quarter

commenced. Barricades began to be fixed. Everyone was very grave now; the EXTERNES went away, but

no one came to fetch me, so I had to stay. No lessons could go on. A troop of armed men took possession of

the barricades, so it was supposed I should have to sleep there. The revolters came and asked for arms, but

Deluc (headmaster) is a National Guard, and he said he had only his own and he wanted them; but he said

he would not fire on them. Then they asked for wine, which he gave them. They took good care not to get

drunk, knowing they would not be able to fight. They were very polite and behaved extremely well.

'About 12 o'clock a servant came for a boy who lived near me, [and] Deluc thought it best to send me with

him. We heard a good deal of firing near, but did not come across any of the parties. As we approached the

railway, the barricades were no longer formed of palings, planks, or stones; but they had got all the

omnibuses as they passed, sent the horses and passengers about their business, and turned them over. A

double row of overturned coaches made a capital barricade, with a few paving stones.

'When I got home I found to my astonishment that in our fighting quarter it was much quieter. Mamma had

just been out seeing the troops in the Place de la Concorde, when suddenly the Municipal Guard, now fairly

exasperated, prevented the National Guard from proceeding, and fired at them; the National Guard had come

with their muskets not loaded, but at length returned the fire. Mamma saw the National Guard fire. The

Municipal Guard were round the corner. She was delighted for she saw no person killed, though many of the

'I immediately went out with my papa (mamma had just come back with him) and went to the Place de la

Concorde. There was an enormous quantity of troops in the Place. Suddenly the gates of the gardens of the

Tuileries opened: we rushed forward, out gallopped an enormous number of cuirassiers, in the middle of

which were a couple of low carriages, said first to contain the Count de Paris and the Duchess of Orleans, but

afterwards they said it was the King and Queen; and then I heard he had abdicated. I returned and gave the

'Went out again up the Boulevards. The house of the Minister of Foreign Affairs was filled with people and

"HOTEL DU PEUPLE" written on it; the Boulevards were barricaded with fine old trees that were cut down

and stretched all across the road. We went through a great many little streets, all strongly barricaded, and

sentinels of the people at the principal of them. The streets were very unquiet, filled with armed men and

women, for the troops had followed the exKing to Neuilly and left Paris in the power of the people. We met

the captain of the Third Legion of the National Guard (who had principally protected the people), badly

wounded by a Municipal Guard, stretched on a litter. He was in possession of his senses. He was surrounded

by a troop of men crying "Our brave captain we have him yet he's not dead! VIVE LA REFORME!" This

cry was responded to by all, and every one saluted him as he passed. I do not know if he was mortally

'I then returned, and shortly afterwards went out again to the garden of the Tuileries. They were given up to

the people and the palace was being sacked. The people were firing blank cartridges to testify their joy, and

they had a cannon on the top of the palace. It was a sight to see a palace sacked and armed vagabonds firing

out of the windows, and throwing shirts, papers, and dresses of all kinds out of the windows. They are not

rogues, these French; they are not stealing, burning, or doing much harm. In the Tuileries they have dressed

up some of the statues, broken some, and stolen nothing but queer dresses. I say, Frank, you must not hate the

French; hate the Germans if you like. The French laugh at us a little, and call out GODDAM in the streets;

but today, in civil war, when they might have put a bullet through our heads, I never was insulted once.

'At present we have a provisional Government, consisting of Odion [SIC] Barrot, Lamartine, Marast, and

some others; among them a common workman, but very intelligent. This is a triumph of liberty rather!

'Now then, Frank, what do you think of it? I in a revolution and out all day. Just think, what fun! So it was at

first, till I was fired at yesterday; but today I was not frightened, but it turned me sick at heart, I don't know

why. There has been no great bloodshed, [though] I certainly have seen men's blood several times. But there's

something shocking to see a whole armed populace, though not furious, for not one single shop has been

broken open, except the gunsmiths' shops, and most of the arms will probably be taken back again. For the

French have no cupidity in their nature; they don't like to steal it is not in their nature. I shall send this letter

in a day or two, when I am sure the post will go again. I know I have been a long time writing, but I hope you

will find the matter of this letter interesting, as coming from a person resident on the spot; though probably

you don't take much interest in the French, but I can think, write, and speak on no other subject.

'There is no more fighting, the people have conquered; but the barricades are still kept up, and the people are

in arms, more than ever fearing some new act of treachery on the part of the exKing. The fight where I was

was the principal cause of the Revolution. I was in little danger from the shot, for there was an immense

crowd in front of me, though quite within gunshot. [By another letter, a hundred yards from the troops.] I

'The Paris streets are filled with the most extraordinary crowds of men, women and children, ladies and

gentlemen. Every person joyful. The bands of armed men are perfectly polite. Mamma and aunt today

walked through armed crowds alone, that were firing blank cartridges in all directions. Every person made

way with the greatest politeness, and one common man with a blouse, coming by accident against her

immediately stopped to beg her pardon in the politest manner. There are few drunken men. The Tuileries is

still being run over by the people; they only broke two things, a bust of Louis Philippe and one of Marshal

'I have been out all day again today, and precious tired I am. The Republican party seem the strongest, and

'The title of "Mister" is abandoned; they say nothing but "Citizen," and the people are shaking hands

amazingly. They have got to the top of the public monuments, and, mingling with bronze or stone statues,

five or six make a sort of TABLEAU VIVANT, the top man holding up the red flag of the Republic; and

right well they do it, and very picturesque they look. I think I shall put this letter in the post tomorrow as we

'M. Lamartine has now by his eloquence conquered the whole armed crowd of citizens threatening to kill him

if he did not immediately proclaim the Republic and red flag. He said he could not yield to the citizens of

Paris alone, that the whole country must be consulted; that he chose the tricolour, for it had followed and

accompanied the triumphs of France all over the world, and that the red flag had only been dipped in the

blood of the citizens. For sixty hours he has been quieting the people: he is at the head of everything. Don't be

prejudiced, Frank, by what you see in the papers. The French have acted nobly, splendidly; there has been no

brutality, plundering, or stealing. . . . I did not like the French before; but in this respect they are the finest

And there one could wish to stop with this apotheosis of liberty and order read with the generous enthusiasm

of a boy; but as the reader knows, it was but the first act of the piece. The letters, vivid as they are, written as

they were by a hand trembling with fear and excitement, yet do injustice, in their boyishness of tone, to the

profound effect produced. At the sound of these songs and shot of cannon, the boy's mind awoke. He dated

his own appreciation of the art of acting from the day when he saw and heard Rachel recite the

'MARSEILLAISE' at the Francais, the tricolour in her arms. What is still more strange, he had been up to

then invincibly indifferent to music, insomuch that he could not distinguish 'God save the Queen' from

'Bonnie Dundee'; and now, to the chanting of the mob, he amazed his family by learning and singing

'MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE.' But the letters, though they prepare the mind for no such revolution in the

boy's tastes and feelings, are yet full of entertaining traits. Let the reader note Fleeming's eagerness to

influence his friend Frank, an incipient Tory (no less) as further history displayed; his unconscious

indifference to his father and devotion to his mother, betrayed in so many significant expressions and

omissions; the sense of dignity of this diminutive 'person resident on the spot,' who was so happy as to escape

insult; and the strange picture of the household father, mother, son, and even poor Aunt Anna all day in

the streets in the thick of this rough business, and the boy packed off alone to school in a distant quarter on

They had all the gift of enjoying life's texture as it comes; they were all born optimists. The name of liberty

was honoured in that family, its spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign friends of Mrs.

Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, they beheld

At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their element in such a decent and whiggish

And I cannot but smile when I think that (again like Wordsworth) they should have so specially disliked the

It came upon them by surprise. Liberal friends of the precise right shade of colour had assured them, in Mrs.

Turner's drawing room, that all was for the best; and they rose on January 23 without fear. About the middle

of the day they heard the sound of musketry, and the next morning they were wakened by the cannonade. The

French who had behaved so 'splendidly,' pausing, at the voice of Lamartine, just where judicious Liberals

could have desired the French, who had 'no cupidity in their nature,' were now about to play a variation on

the theme rebellion. The Jenkins took refuge in the house of Mrs. Turner, the house of the false prophets,

'Anna going with Mrs. Turner, that she might be prevented speaking English, Fleeming, Miss H. and I (it is

the mother who writes) walking together. As we reached the Rue de Clichy, the report of the cannon sounded

close to our ears and made our hearts sick, I assure you. The fighting was at the barrier Rochechouart, a few

streets off. All Saturday and Sunday we were a prey to great alarm, there came so many reports that the

insurgents were getting the upper hand. One could tell the state of affairs from the extreme quiet or the

sudden hum in the street. When the news was bad, all the houses closed and the people disappeared; when

better, the doors half opened and you heard the sound of men again. From the upper windows we could see

each discharge from the Bastille I mean the smoke rising and also the flames and smoke from the

Boulevard la Chapelle. We were four ladies, and only Fleeming by way of a man, and difficulty enough we

had to keep him from joining the National Guards his pride and spirit were both fired. You cannot picture

to yourself the multitudes of soldiers, guards, and armed men of all sorts we watched not close to the

window, however, for such havoc had been made among them by the firing from the windows, that as the

battalions marched by, they cried, "Fermez vos fenetres!" and it was very painful to watch their looks of

'The Revolution,' writes Fleeming to Frank Scott, 'was quite delightful: getting popped at and run at by

horses, and giving sous for the wounded into little boxes guarded by the raggedest, picturesquest,

delightfullest, sentinels; but the insurrection! ugh, I shudder to think at [SIC] it.' He found it 'not a bit of fun

sitting boxed up in the house four days almost. . . I was the only GENTLEMAN to four ladies, and didn't they

keep me in order! I did not dare to show my face at a window, for fear of catching a stray ball or being forced

to enter the National Guard; [for] they would have it I was a man fullgrown, French, and every way fit to

fight. And my mamma was as bad as any of them; she that told me I was a coward last time if I stayed in the

house a quarter of an hour! But I drew, examined the pistols, of which I found lots with caps, powder, and

ball, while sometimes murderous intentions of killing a dozen insurgents and dying violently overpowered by

numbers. . . . .' We may drop this sentence here: under the conduct of its boyish writer, it was to reach no

Four days of such a discipline had cured the family of Paris; the same year Fleeming was to write, in answer

apparently to a question of Frank Scott's, 'I could find no national game in France but revolutions'; and the

witticism was justified in their experience. On the first possible day, they applied for passports, and were

advised to take the road to Geneva. It appears it was scarce safe to leave Paris for England. Charles Reade,

with keen dramatic gusto, had just smuggled himself out of that city in the bottom of a cab. English gold had

been found on the insurgents, the name of England was in evil odour; and it was thus for strategic reasons,

so to speak that Fleeming found himself on the way to that Italy where he was to complete his education,

It was in Genoa they settled; partly for the sake of the captain, who might there find naval comrades; partly

because of the Ruffinis, who had been friends of Mrs. Jenkin in their time of exile and were now considerable

men at home; partly, in fine, with hopes that Fleeming might attend the University; in preparation for which

he was put at once to school. It was the year of Novara; Mazzini was in Rome; the dry bones of Italy were

moving; and for people of alert and liberal sympathies the time was inspiriting. What with exiles turned

Ministers of State, universities thrown open to Protestants, Fleeming himself the first Protestant student in

Genoa, and thus, as his mother writes, 'a living instance of the progress of liberal ideas' it was little wonder

if the enthusiastic young woman and the clever boy were heart and soul upon the side of Italy. It should not

be forgotten that they were both on their first visit to that country; the mother still child enough 'to be

delighted when she saw real monks'; and both mother and son thrilling with the first sight of snowy Alps, the

blue Mediterranean, and the crowded port and the palaces of Genoa. Nor was their zeal without knowledge.

Ruffini, deputy for Genoa and soon to be head of the University, was at their side; and by means of him the

family appear to have had access to much Italian society. To the end, Fleeming professed his admiration of

the Piedmontese and his unalterable confidence in the future of Italy under their conduct; for Victor Emanuel,

Cavour, the first La Marmora and Garibaldi, he had varying degrees of sympathy and praise: perhaps highest

for the King, whose good sense and temper filled him with respect perhaps least for Garibaldi, whom he

But this is to look forward: these were the days not of Victor Emanuel but of Charles Albert; and it was on

Charles Albert that mother and son had now fixed their eyes as on the swordbearer of Italy. On Fleeming's

sixteenth birthday, they were, the mother writes, 'in great anxiety for news from the army. You can have no

idea what it is to live in a country where such a struggle is going on. The interest is one that absorbs all

others. We eat, drink, and sleep to the noise of drums and musketry. You would enjoy and almost admire

Fleeming's enthusiasm and earnestness and, courage, I may say for we are among the small minority of

English who side with the Italians. The other day, at dinner at the Consul's, boy as he is, and in spite of my

admonitions, Fleeming defended the Italian cause, and so well that he "tripped up the heels of his adversary"

simply from being wellinformed on the subject and honest. He is as true as steel, and for no one will he

bend right or left. . . . . Do not fancy him a Bobadil,' she adds, 'he is only a very true, candid boy. I am so glad

If this letter is correctly dated, the cause was already lost and the King had already abdicated when these lines

were written. No sooner did the news reach Genoa, than there began 'tumultuous movements'; and the

Jenkins' received hints it would be wise to leave the city. But they had friends and interests; even the captain

had English officers to keep him company, for Lord Hardwicke's ship, the VENGEANCE, lay in port; and

supposing the danger to be real, I cannot but suspect the whole family of a divided purpose, prudence being

possibly weaker than curiosity. Stay, at least, they did, and thus rounded their experience of the revolutionary

year. On Sunday, April 1, Fleeming and the captain went for a ramble beyond the walls, leaving Aunt Anna

and Mrs. Jenkin to walk on the bastions with some friends. On the way back, this party turned aside to rest in

the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie. 'We had remarked,' writes Mrs. Jenkin, 'the entire absence of

sentinels on the ramparts, and how the cannons were left in solitary state; and I had just remarked "How quiet

everything is!" when suddenly we heard the drums begin to beat and distant shouts. ACCUSTOMED AS WE

ARE to revolutions, we never thought of being frightened.' For all that, they resumed their return home. On

the way they saw men running and vociferating, but nothing to indicate a general disturbance, until, near the

Duke's palace, they came upon and passed a shouting mob dragging along with it three cannon. It had

scarcely passed before they heard 'a rushing sound'; one of the gentlemen thrust back the party of ladies under

a shed, and the mob passed again. A finelooking young man was in their hands; and Mrs. Jenkin saw him

with his mouth open as if he sought to speak, saw him tossed from one to another like a ball, and then saw

him no more. 'He was dead a few instants after, but the crowd hid that terror from us. My knees shook under

me and my sight left me.' With this street tragedy, the curtain rose upon their second revolution.

The attack on Spirito Santo, and the capitulation and departure of the troops speedily followed. Genoa was in

the hands of the Republicans, and now came a time when the English residents were in a position to pay some

return for hospitality received. Nor were they backward. Our Consul (the same who had the benefit of

correction from Fleeming) carried the Intendente on board the VENGEANCE, escorting him through the

streets, getting along with him on board a shore boat, and when the insurgents levelled their muskets,

standing up and naming himself, 'CONSOLE INGLESE.' A friend of the Jenkins', Captain Glynne, had a

more painful, if a less dramatic part. One Colonel Nosozzo had been killed (I read) while trying to prevent his

own artillery from firing on the mob; but in that hell's cauldron of a distracted city, there were no distinctions

made, and the Colonel's widow was hunted for her life. In her grief and peril, the Glynnes received and hid

her; Captain Glynne sought and found her husband's body among the slain, saved it for two days, brought the

widow a lock of the dead man's hair; but at last, the mob still strictly searching, seems to have abandoned the

body, and conveyed his guest on board the VENGEANCE. The Jenkins also had their refugees, the family of

an EMPLOYE threatened by a decree. 'You should have seen me making a Union Jack to nail over our door,'

writes Mrs. Jenkin. 'I never worked so fast in my life. Monday and Tuesday,' she continues, 'were tolerably

quiet, our hearts beating fast in the hope of La Marmora's approach, the streets barricaded, and none but

foreigners and women allowed to leave the city.' On Wednesday, La Marmora came indeed, but in the ugly

form of a bombardment; and that evening the Jenkins sat without lights about their drawingroom window,

'watching the huge red flashes of the cannon' from the Brigato and La Specula forts, and hearkening, not

Lord Hardwicke intervened between the rebels and La Marmora; and there followed a troubled armistice,

filled with the voice of panic. Now the VENGEANCE was known to be cleared for action; now it was

rumoured that the galley slaves were to be let loose upon the town, and now that the troops would enter it by

storm. Crowds, trusting in the Union Jack over the Jenkins' door, came to beg them to receive their linen and

other valuables; nor could their instances be refused; and in the midst of all this bustle and alarm, piles of

goods must be examined and long inventories made. At last the captain decided things had gone too far. He

himself apparently remained to watch over the linen; but at five o'clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna,

Fleeming, and his mother were rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer 'nine

mortal hours of agonising suspense.' With the end of that time, peace was restored. On Tuesday morning

officers with white flags appeared on the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched in, two

hundred men sleeping on the ground floor of the Jenkins' house, thirty thousand in all entering the city, but

With the return of quiet, and the reopening of the universities, we behold a new character, Signor Flaminio:

the professors, it appears, made no attempt upon the Jenkin; and thus readily italianised the Fleeming. He

came well recommended; for their friend Ruffini was then, or soon after, raised to be the head of the

University; and the professors were very kind and attentive, possibly to Ruffini's PROTEGE, perhaps also to

the first Protestant student. It was no joke for Signor Flaminio at first; certificates had to be got from Paris

and from Rector Williams; the classics must be furbished up at home that he might follow Latin lectures;

examinations bristled in the path, the entrance examination with Latin and English essay, and oral trials

(much softened for the foreigner) in Horace, Tacitus, and Cicero, and the first University examination only

three months later, in Italian eloquence, no less, and other wider subjects. On one point the first Protestant

student was moved to thank his stars: that there was no Greek required for the degree. Little did he think, as

he set down his gratitude, how much, in later life and among cribs and dictionaries, he was to lament this

circumstance; nor how much of that later life he was to spend acquiring, with infinite toil, a shadow of what

he might then have got with ease and fully. But if his Genoese education was in this particular imperfect, he

was fortunate in the branches that more immediately touched on his career. The physical laboratory was the

best mounted in Italy. Bancalari, the professor of natural philosophy, was famous in his day; by what seems

even an odd coincidence, he went deeply into electromagnetism; and it was principally in that subject that

Signor Flaminio, questioned in Latin and answering in Italian, passed his Master of Arts degree with

firstclass honours. That he had secured the notice of his teachers, one circumstance sufficiently proves. A

philosophical society was started under the presidency of Mamiani, 'one of the examiners and one of the

leaders of the Moderate party'; and out of five promising students brought forward by the professors to attend

the sittings and present essays, Signor Flaminio was one. I cannot find that he ever read an essay; and indeed

I think his hands were otherwise too full. He found his fellowstudents 'not such a bad set of chaps,' and

preferred the Piedmontese before the Genoese; but I suspect he mixed not very freely with either. Not only

were his days filled with university work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to the arts under the eye of

a beloved taskmistress. He worked hard and well in the art school, where he obtained a silver medal 'for a

couple of legs the size of life drawn from one of Raphael's cartoons.' His holidays were spent in sketching;

his evenings, when they were free, at the theatre. Here at the opera he discovered besides a taste for a new art,

the art of music; and it was, he wrote, 'as if he had found out a heaven on earth.' 'I am so anxious that

whatever he professes to know, he should really perfectly possess,' his mother wrote, 'that I spare no pains';

neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the piano,

she started him with characteristic barbarity on the scales; and heard in consequence 'heartrending groans'

and saw 'anguished claspings of hands' as he lost his way among their arid intricacies.

In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is something, for the period, girlish. He was indeed his mother's

boy; and it was fortunate his mother was not altogether feminine. She gave her son a womanly delicacy in

morals, to a man's taste to his own taste in later life too finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than

healthful. She encouraged him besides in drawingroom interests. But in other points her influence was

manlike. Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she taught him to make of the least of these accomplishments

a virile task; and the teaching lasted him through life. Immersed as she was in the day's movements and

buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to him her creed in politics: an enduring kindness for Italy,

and a loyalty, like that of many clever women, to the Liberal party with but small regard to men or measures.

This attitude of mind used often to disappoint me in a man so fond of logic; but I see now how it was learned

from the bright eyes of his mother and to the sound of the cannonades of 1848. To some of her defects,

besides, she made him heir. Kind as was the bond that united her to her son, kind and even pretty, she was

scarce a woman to adorn a home; loving as she did to shine; careless as she was of domestic, studious of

public graces. She probably rejoiced to see the boy grow up in somewhat of the image of herself, generous,

excessive, enthusiastic, external; catching at ideas, brandishing them when caught; fiery for the right, but

always fiery; ready at fifteen to correct a consul, ready at fifty to explain to any artist his own art.

The defects and advantages of such a training were obvious in Fleeming throughout life. His thoroughness

was not that of the patient scholar, but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate study; he had learned

too much from dogma, given indeed by cherished lips; and precocious as he was in the use of the tools of the

mind, he was truly backward in knowledge of life and of himself. Such as it was at least, his home and school

training was now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as being formed in a household of meagre

revenue, among foreign surroundings, and under the influence of an imperious drawingroom queen; from

whom he learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense of duty, much forwardness of bearing, all

manner of studious and artistic interests, and many readymade opinions which he embraced with a son's and

Return to England Fleeming at Fairbairn's Experience in a Strike Dr. Bell and Greek Architecture

The Gaskells Fleeming at Greenwich The Austins Fleeming and the Austins His Engagement

IN 1851, the year of Aunt Anna's death, the family left Genoa and came to Manchester, where Fleeming was

entered in Fairbairn's works as an apprentice. From the palaces and Alps, the Mole, the blue Mediterranean,

the humming lanes and the bright theatres of Genoa, he fell and he was sharply conscious of the fall to

the dim skies and the foul ways of Manchester. England he found on his return 'a horrid place,' and there is no

doubt the family found it a dear one. The story of the Jenkin finances is not easy to follow. The family, I am

told, did not practice frugality, only lamented that it should be needful; and Mrs. Jenkin, who was always

complaining of 'those dreadful bills,' was 'always a good deal dressed.' But at this time of the return to

England, things must have gone further. A holiday tour of a fortnight, Fleeming feared would be beyond what

he could afford, and he only projected it 'to have a castle in the air.' And there were actual pinches. Fresh

from a warmer sun, he was obliged to go without a greatcoat, and learned on railway journeys to supply the

From halfpast eight till six, he must 'file and chip vigorously in a moleskin suit and infernally dirty.' The

work was not new to him, for he had already passed some time in a Genoese shop; and to Fleeming no work

was without interest. Whatever a man can do or know, he longed to know and do also. 'I never learned

anything,' he wrote, 'not even standing on my head, but I found a use for it.' In the spare hours of his first

telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he meant 'to learn the whole art of

navigation, every rope in the ship and how to handle her on any occasion'; and once when he was shown a

young lady's holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, 'It showed me my eyes had been idle.' Nor was

his the case of the mere literary smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do and to do

well, was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted

and inspired him. I remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly fitted that,

when one was driven home, the others started from their places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was

pictured in that box; that plain piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of perfection as the

happiest drawing or the finest bronze; and he who could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it

in the others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo's engineering and anatomical drawings a perpetual feast; and of

the former he spoke even with emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to separate

the fine arts from the arts of handicraft; any definition or theory that failed to bring these two together,

according to him, had missed the point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing things well

done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to deny that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom

of all. And on the other hand, a nail illdriven, a joint illfitted, a tracing clumsily done, anything to which a

man had set his hand and not set it aptly, moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would

feel but little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be done, slovenliness to be avoided,

and a higher mark of skill to be attained; he would chip and file, as he had practiced scales, impatient of his

And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving daily among those strange creations of

man's brain, to some so abhorrent, to him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are

made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an elephant's, and now with a touch more

precise and dainty than a pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with him, and he

had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when I had proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this

defect, he looked at me askance. 'And the best of the joke,' said he, 'is that he thinks himself quite a poet.' For

to him the struggle of the engineer against brute forces and with inert allies, was nobly poetic. Habit never

dulled in him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his profession. Habit only sharpened his

inventor's gusto in contrivance, in triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are taught

to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant

the great results alone are admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the infinite device

A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn's, a pupil would never be popular unless he

drank with the workmen and imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who would do none of these

things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the subject of remark in Manchester, where

some memory of it lingers till today. He thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be brought into

a close relation with the working classes; and for the skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his

company, his virtues, and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to regard them, like a

platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other hand, broad distinctions; and it was his profound sense of

the difference between one working man and another that led him to devote so much time, in later days, to

the furtherance of technical education. In 1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in

the excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both would seem to have behaved.

Beginning with a fair show of justice on either side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy,

and the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. 'On Wednesday last,' writes Fleeming, 'about three

thousand banded round Fairbairn's door at 6 o'clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the

lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders came that no one was to leave the works; but the men inside

(Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my

companions and myself went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of every possible groan and bad

language.' But the police cleared a lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape unhurt, and

only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for

nothing, that fine thrill of expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob. 'I never before felt

Outside as inside the works, he was 'pretty merry and well to do,' zealous in study, welcome to many friends,

unwearied in loving kindness to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week with Dr. Bell,

'working away at certain geometrical methods of getting the Greek architectural proportions': a business after

Fleeming's heart, for he was never so pleased as when he could marry his two devotions, art and science. This

was besides, in all likelihood, the beginning of that love and intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the

least to the greatest, from the AGAMEMMON (perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to the details of Grecian

tailoring, which he used to express in his familiar phrase: 'The Greeks were the boys.' Dr. Bell the son of

George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, and though he made less use of it than some, a sharer in the

distinguished talents of his race had hit upon the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave the

proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's direction, applied the same method to the other

orders, and again found the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were prepared; but the

discovery was never given to the world, perhaps because of the dissensions that arose between the authors.

For Dr. Bell believed that 'these intersections were in some way connected with, or symbolical of, the

antagonistic forces at work'; but his pupil and helper, with characteristic trenchancy, brushed aside this

mysticism, and interpreted the discovery as 'a geometrical method of dividing the spaces or (as might be said)

of setting out the work, purely empirical and in no way connected with any laws of either force or beauty.'

'Many a hard and pleasant fight we had over it,' wrote Jenkin, in later years; 'and impertinent as it may seem,

the pupil is still unconvinced by the arguments of the master.' I do not know about the antagonistic forces in

the Doric order; in Fleeming they were plain enough; and the Bobadil of these affairs with Dr. Bell was still,

like the corrector of Italian consuls, 'a great child in everything but information.' At the house of Colonel

Cleather, he might be seen with a family of children; and with these, there was no word of the Greek orders;

with these Fleeming was only an uproarious boy and an entertaining draughtsman; so that his coming was the

signal for the young people to troop into the playroom, where sometimes the roof rang with romping, and

In another Manchester family, whose name will be familiar to my readers that of the Gaskells, Fleeming

was a frequent visitor. To Mrs. Gaskell, he would often bring his new ideas, a process that many of his later

friends will understand and, in their own cases, remember. With the girls, he had 'constant fierce wrangles,'

forcing them to reason out their thoughts and to explain their prepossessions; and I hear from Miss Gaskell

that they used to wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his character into the smallest matters, and to

admire his unselfish devotion to his parents. Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most

characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his doctrine that the end justifies the means, and

that it is quite right 'to boast of your six menservants to a burglar or to steal a knife to prevent a murder'; and

the Miss Gaskells, with girlish loyalty to what is current, had rejected the heresy with indignation. From such

passagesatarms, many retire mortified and ruffled; but Fleeming had no sooner left the house than he fell

into delighted admiration of the spirit of his adversaries. From that it was but a step to ask himself 'what truth

was sticking in their heads'; for even the falsest form of words (in Fleeming's lifelong opinion) reposed upon

some truth, just as he could 'not even allow that people admire ugly things, they admire what is pretty in the

ugly thing.' And before he sat down to write his letter, he thought he had hit upon the explanation. 'I fancy the

true idea,' he wrote, 'is that you must never do yourself or anyone else a moral injury make any man a thief

or a liar for any end'; quite a different thing, as he would have loved to point out, from never stealing or

lying. But this perfervid disputant was not always out of key with his audience. One whom he met in the

same house announced that she would never again be happy. 'What does that signify?' cried Fleeming. 'We

are not here to be happy, but to be good.' And the words (as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of

From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in Switzerland, and thence again to

Mr. Penn's at Greenwich, where he was engaged as draughtsman. There in 1856, we find him in 'a terribly

busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable gun boats and steam frigates for the ensuing campaign.'

From halfpast eight in the morning till nine or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among

uncongenial comrades, 'saluted by chaff, generally low personal and not witty,' pelted with oranges and

apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying

to be as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, 'across a dirty green and through some

halfbuilt streets of twostoried houses'; he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study

by himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several ladies, young and not so young,

with whom he liked to correspond. But not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who

had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings, unsuitable society, and work that leaned

to the mechanical. 'Sunday,' says he, 'I generally visit some friends in town and seem to swim in clearer

water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could

not stand this life.' It is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to stand it without loss. 'We

are not here to be happy, but to be good,' quoth the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for

happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides when apart from circumstances, few men are

agreeable to their neighbours and still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had arrived,

later than common and even worse provided. The letter from which I have quoted is the last of his

correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last confidential letter to one of his own sex. 'If you consider it

rightly,' he wrote long after, 'you will find the want of correspondence no such strange want in men's

friendships. There is, believe me, something noble in the metal which does not rust though not burnished by

daily use.' It is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has

outgrown his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a busy youth of three and

twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope IN

VACUO, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth stands

With Fleeming this disease was never seemingly severe. The very day before this (to me) distasteful letter, he

had written to Miss Bell of Manchester in a sweeter strain; I do not quote the one, I quote the other; fair

things are the best. 'I keep my own little lodgings,' he writes, 'but come up every night to see mamma' (who

was then on a visit to London) 'if not kept too late at the works; and have singing lessons once more, and sing

"DONNE L'AMORE E SCALTRO PARGOLETTO"; and think and talk about you; and listen to mamma's

projects DE Stowting. Everything turns to gold at her touch, she's a fairy and no mistake. We go on talking

till I have a picture in my head, and can hardly believe at the end that the original is Stowting. Even you don't

know half how good mamma is; in other things too, which I must not mention. She teaches me how it is not

necessary to be very rich to do much good. I begin to understand that mamma would find useful occupation

and create beauty at the bottom of a volcano. She has little weaknesses, but is a real generoushearted

woman, which I suppose is the finest thing in the world.' Though neither mother nor son could be called

beautiful, they make a pretty picture; the ugly, generous, ardent woman weaving rainbow illusions; the ugly,

clearsighted, loving son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours of pleasure, half beguiled, halfamused,

wholly admiring, as he listens. But as he goes home, and the fancy pictures fade, and Stowting is once more

burthened with debt, and the noisy companions and the long hours of drudgery once more approach, no

wonder if the dirty green seems all the dirtier or if Atlas must resume his load.

But in healthy natures, this time of moral teething passes quickly of itself, and is easily alleviated by fresh

interests; and already, in the letter to Frank Scott, there are two words of hope: his friends in London, his love

for his profession. The last might have saved him; for he was ere long to pass into a new sphere, where all his

faculties were to be tried and exercised, and his life to be filled with interest and effort. But it was not left to

engineering: another and more influential aim was to be set before him. He must, in any case, have fallen in

love; in any case, his love would have ruled his life; and the question of choice was, for the descendant of two

such families, a thing of paramount importance. Innocent of the world, fiery, generous, devoted as he was, the

son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have been led far astray. By one of those partialities that

fill men at once with gratitude and wonder, his choosing was directed well. Or are we to say that by a man's

choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may discern: that

a man but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his helpmate; and he must in part deserve her, or the treasure

is but won for a moment to be lost. Fleeming chanced if you will (and indeed all these opportunities are as

'random as blind man's buff') upon a wife who was worthy of him; but he had the wit to know it, the courage

to wait and labour for his prize, and the tenderness and chivalry that are required to keep such prizes precious.

Upon this point he has himself written well, as usual with fervent optimism, but as usual (in his own phrase)

'Love,' he wrote, 'is not an intuition of the person most suitable to us, most required by us; of the person with

whom life flowers and bears fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be small

indeed; our intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love

works differently, and in its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires to be loved,

each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing

the ideal of the other, tries to fulfil that ideal, each partially succeeds. The greater the love, the greater the

success; the nobler the idea of each, the more durable, the more beautiful the effect. Meanwhile the blindness

of each to the other's defects enables the transformation to proceed [unobserved,] so that when the veil is

withdrawn (if it ever is, and this I do not know) neither knows that any change has occurred in the person

whom they loved. Do not fear, therefore. I do not tell you that your friend will not change, but as I am sure

that her choice cannot be that of a man with a base ideal, so I am sure the change will be a safe and a good

Among other introductions in London, Fleeming had presented a letter from Mrs. Gaskell to the Alfred

Austins. This was a family certain to interest a thoughtful young man. Alfred, the youngest and least known

of the Austins, had been a beautiful goldenhaired child, petted and kept out of the way of both sport and

study by a partial mother. Bred an attorney, he had (like both his brothers) changed his way of life, and was

called to the bar when past thirty. A Commission of Enquiry into the state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave

him an opportunity of proving his true talents; and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at Worcester,

next at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato famine and the Irish immigration of the 'forties, and

finally in London, where he again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He was then

advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's Office of Works and Public Buildings; a position

which he filled with perfect competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his retirement, in 1868, he

was made a Companion of the Bath. While apprentice to a Norwich attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent

visitor in the house of Mr. Barron, a rallying place in those days of intellectual society. Edward Barron, the

son of a rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough, was a man typical of the time. When he was a child,

he had once been patted on the head in his father's shop by no less a man than Samuel Johnson, as the Doctor

went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale; and the child was true to this early consecration. 'A life

of lettered ease spent in provincial retirement,' it is thus that the biographer of that remarkable man, William

Taylor, announces his subject; and the phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The pair

were close friends, 'W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,' writes Barron in his diary in 1823; and in

1833, after Barron had moved to London and Taylor had tasted the first public failure of his powers, the latter

wrote: 'To my ever dearest Mr. Barron say, if you please, that I miss him more than I regret him that I

acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich, because I could ill brook his observation of my increasing debility

of mind.' This chosen companion of William Taylor must himself have been no ordinary man; and he was the

friend besides of Borrow, whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire for popular distinction,

lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield of Enfield's SPEAKER, and devoted his time to the

education of his family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits of stoicism, that would

surprise a modern. From these children we must single out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under

his care to be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without outward sign after the

manner of the Godwin school. This was the more notable, as the girl really derived from the Enfields; whose

highflown romantic temper, I wish I could find space to illustrate. She was but seven years old, when Alfred

Austin remarked and fell in love with her; and the union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the

husband and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed with perfect temper and

content; and in the conduct of life, and in depth and durability of love, they were at one. Each full of high

spirits, each practised something of the same repression: no sharp word was uttered in their house. The same

point of honour ruled them, a guest was sacred and stood within the pale from criticism. It was a house,

besides, of unusual intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the early days of the marriage, the three

brothers, John, Charles, and Alfred, marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and 'reasoning

high' till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen

cups of tea. And though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were separated, Charles long ago

retired from the world at Brandeston, and John already near his end in the 'rambling old house' at Weybridge,

Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much intellectual society, and still, as indeed they remained

until the last, youthfully alert in mind. There was but one child of the marriage, Anne, and she was herself

something new for the eyes of the young visitor; brought up, as she had been, like her mother before her, to

the standard of a man's acquirements. Only one art had she been denied, she must not learn the violin the

thought was too monstrous even for the Austins; and indeed it would seem as if that tide of reform which we

may date from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft had in some degree even receded; for though Miss Austin

was suffered to learn Greek, the accomplishment was kept secret like a piece of guilt. But whether this stealth

was caused by a backward movement in public thought since the time of Edward Barron, or by the change

When Fleeming presented his letter, he fell in love at first sight with Mrs. Austin and the life, and atmosphere

of the house. There was in the society of the Austins, outward, stoical conformers to the world, something

gravely suggestive of essential eccentricity, something unpretentiously breathing of intellectual effort, that

could not fail to hit the fancy of this hotbrained boy. The unbroken enamel of courtesy, the selfrestraint,

the dignified kindness of these married folk, had besides a particular attraction for their visitor. He could not

but compare what he saw, with what he knew of his mother and himself. Whatever virtues Fleeming

possessed, he could never count on being civil; whatever brave, truehearted qualities he was able to admire

in Mrs. Jenkin, mildness of demeanour was not one of them. And here he found per sons who were the equals

of his mother and himself in intellect and width of interest, and the equals of his father in mild urbanity of

disposition. Show Fleeming an active virtue, and he always loved it. He went away from that house struck

through with admiration, and vowing to himself that his own married life should be upon that pattern, his

wife (whoever she might be) like Eliza Barron, himself such another husband as Alfred Austin. What is more

strange, he not only brought away, but left behind him, golden opinions. He must have been he was, I am

told a trying lad; but there shone out of him such a light of innocent candour, enthusiasm, intelligence, and

appreciation, that to persons already some way forward in years, and thus able to enjoy indulgently the

perennial comedy of youth, the sight of him was delightful. By a pleasant coincidence, there was one person

in the house whom he did not appreciate and who did not appreciate him: Anne Austin, his future wife. His

boyish vanity ruffled her; his appearance, never impressive, was then, by reason of obtrusive boyishness, still

less so; she found occasion to put him in the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and when Mr. Austin, after

doing his visitor the almost unheardof honour of accompanying him to the door, announced 'That was what

young men were like in my time' she could only reply, looking on her handsome father, 'I thought they had

This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was some time before Fleeming began to

know his mind; and yet longer ere he ventured to show it. The corrected quantity, to those who knew him

well, will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over a correction and to admire the

castigator. And fall in love he did; not hurriedly but step by step, not blindly but with critical discrimination;

not in the fashion of Romeo, but before he was done, with all Romeo's ardour and more than Romeo's faith.

The high favour to which he presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife, might well give him

ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present and the obscurity of the future were there to give him pause;

and when his aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps for the only time in his life, the

pangs of diffidence. There was indeed opening before him a wide door of hope. He had changed into the

service of Messrs. Liddell Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in the new field of marine

telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to face with his life's work. That impotent sense of his own value,

as of a ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall from him. New problems which

he was endowed to solve, vistas of new enquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened before him

continually. His gifts had found their avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of effective exercise, there

must have sprung up at once the hope of what is called by the world success. But from these low beginnings,

it was a far look upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always more than problematical to

any lover; the consent of parents must be always more than doubtful to a young man with a small salary and

no capital except capacity and hope. But Fleeming was not the lad to lose any good thing for the lack of trial;

and at length, in the autumn of 1857, this boyishsized, boyishmannered, and superlatively illdressed

young engineer, entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as we may fancy, and asked leave to pay

his addresses to the daughter. Mrs. Austin already loved him like a son, she was but too glad to give him her

consent; Mr. Austin reserved the right to inquire into his character; from neither was there a word about his

prospects, by neither was his income mentioned. 'Are these people,' he wrote, struck with wonder at this

dignified disinterestedness, 'are these people the same as other people?' It was not till he was armed with this

permission, that Miss Austin even suspected the nature of his hopes: so strong, in this unmannerly boy, was

the principle of true courtesy; so powerful, in this impetuous nature, the springs of self repression. And yet a

boy he was; a boy in heart and mind; and it was with a boy's chivalry and frankness that he won his wife. His

conduct was a model of honour, hardly of tact; to conceal love from the loved one, to court her parents, to be

silent and discreet till these are won, and then without preparation to approach the lady these are not arts

that I would recommend for imitation. They lead to final refusal. Nothing saved Fleeming from that fate, but

one circumstance that cannot be counted upon the hearty favour of the mother, and one gift that is

inimitable and that never failed him throughout life, the gift of a nature essentially noble and outspoken. A

happy and highminded anger flashed through his despair: it won for him his wife.

Nearly two years passed before it was possible to marry: two years of activity, now in London; now at

Birkenhead, fitting out ships, inventing new machinery for new purposes, and dipping into electrical

experiment; now in the ELBA on his first telegraph cruise between Sardinia and Algiers: a busy and

delightful period of bounding ardour, incessant toil, growing hope and fresh interests, with behind and

through all, the image of his beloved. A few extracts from his correspondence with his betrothed will give the

note of these truly joyous years. 'My profession gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for, but

the sorry jade is obviously jealous of you.' '"Poor Fleeming," in spite of wet, cold and wind, clambering

over moist, tarry slips, wandering among pools of slush in waste places inhabited by wandering locomotives,

grows visibly stronger, has dismissed his office cough and cured his toothache.' 'The whole of the paying

out and lifting machinery must be designed and ordered in two or three days, and I am half crazy with work. I

like it though: it's like a good ball, the excitement carries you through.' 'I was running to and from the ships

and warehouse through fierce gusts of rain and wind till near eleven, and you cannot think what a pleasure it

was to be blown about and think of you in your pretty dress.' 'I am at the works till ten and sometimes till

eleven. But I have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass scientific instruments all round

me, and books to read, and experiments to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity

so entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.' And for a last taste, 'Yesterday I had some charming

It was at this time besides that he made the acquaintance of Professor, now Sir William, Thomson. To

describe the part played by these two in each other's lives would lie out of my way. They worked together on

the Committee on Electrical Standards; they served together at the laying down or the repair of many

deepsea cables; and Sir William was regarded by Fleeming, not only with the 'worship' (the word is his

own) due to great scientific gifts, but with an ardour of personal friendship not frequently excelled. To their

association, Fleeming brought the valuable element of a practical understanding; but he never thought or

spoke of himself where Sir William was in question; and I recall quite in his last days, a singular instance of

this modest loyalty to one whom he admired and loved. He drew up a paper, in a quite personal interest, of

his own services; yet even here he must step out of his way, he must add, where it had no claim to be added,

his opinion that, in their joint work, the contributions of Sir William had been always greatly the most

valuable. Again, I shall not readily forget with what emotion he once told me an incident of their associated

travels. On one of the mountain ledges of Madeira, Fleeming's pony bolted between Sir William. and the

precipice above; by strange good fortune and thanks to the steadiness of Sir William's horse, no harm was

done; but for the moment, Fleeming saw his friend hurled into the sea, and almost by his own act: it was a

Fleeming's Marriage His Married Life Professional Difficulties Life at Claygate Illness of Mrs. F.

ON Saturday, Feb. 26, 1859, profiting by a holiday of four days, Fleeming was married to Miss Austin at

Northiam: a place connected not only with his own family but with that of his bride as well. By Tuesday

morning, he was at work again, fitting out cableships at Birkenhead. Of the walk from his lodgings to the

works, I find a graphic sketch in one of his letters: 'Out over the railway bridge, along a wide road raised to

the level of a ground floor above the land, which, not being built upon, harbours puddles, ponds, pigs, and

Irish hovels; so to the dock warehouses, four huge piles of building with no windows, surrounded by a wall

about twelve feet high in through the large gates, round which hang twenty or thirty rusty Irish, playing

pitch and toss and waiting for employment; on along the railway, which came in at the same gates and

which branches down between each vast block past a pilotengine butting refractory trucks into their places

on to the last block, [and] down the branch, sniffing the guanoscented air and detecting the old bones. The

hartshorn flavour of the guano becomes very strong, as I near the docks where, across the ELBA'S decks, a

huge vessel is discharging her cargo of the brown dust, and where huge vessels have been discharging that

same cargo for the last five months.' This was the walk he took his young wife on the morrow of his return.

She had been used to the society of lawyers and civil servants, moving in that circle which seems to itself the

pivot of the nation and is in truth only a clique like another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant

of a nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she now saw for herself, among unsavoury

surroundings. But when their walk brought them within view of the river, she beheld a sight to her of the

most novel beauty: four great, seagoing ships dressed out with flags. 'How lovely!' she cried. 'What is it

for?' 'For you,' said Fleeming. Her surprise was only equalled by her pleasure. But perhaps, for what we

may call private fame, there is no life like that of the engineer; who is a great man in outof theway places,

by the dockside or on the desert island or in populous ships, and remains quite unheard of in the coteries of

London. And Fleeming had already made his mark among the few who had an opportunity of knowing him.

His marriage was the one decisive incident of his career; from that moment until the day of his death, he had

one thought to which all the rest were tributary, the thought of his wife. No one could know him even

slightly, and not remark the absorbing greatness of that sentiment; nor can any picture of the man be drawn

that does not in proportion dwell upon it. This is a delicate task; but if we are to leave behind us (as we wish)

some presentment of the friend we have lost, it is a task that must be undertaken.

For all his play of mind and fancy, for all his indulgence and, as time went on, he grew indulgent

Fleeming had views of duty that were even stern. He was too shrewd a student of his fellow men to remain

long content with rigid formulae of conduct. Iron bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he

soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages. 'As to Miss (I declare I forget her name) being

bad,' I find him writing, 'people only mean that she has broken the Decalogue which is not at all the same

thing. People who have kept in the highroad of Life really have less opportunity for taking a comprehensive

view of it than those who have leaped over the hedges and strayed up the hills; not but what the hedges are

very necessary, and our stray travellers often have a weary time of it. So, you may say, have those in the

dusty roads.' Yet he was himself a very stern respecter of the hedgerows; sought safety and found dignity in

the obvious path of conduct; and would palter with no simple and recognised duty of his epoch. Of marriage

in particular, of the bond so formed, of the obligations incurred, of the debt men owe to their children, he

conceived in a truly antique spirit: not to blame others, but to constrain himself. It was not to blame, I repeat,

that he held these views; for others, he could make a large allowance; and yet he tacitly expected of his

friends and his wife a high standard of behaviour. Nor was it always easy to wear the armour of that ideal.

Acting upon these beliefs; conceiving that he had indeed 'given himself' (in the full meaning of these words)

for better, for worse; painfully alive to his defects of temper and deficiency in charm; resolute to make up for

these; thinking last of himself: Fleeming was in some ways the very man to have made a noble, uphill fight of

an unfortunate marriage. In other ways, it is true he was one of the most unfit for such a trial. And it was his

beautiful destiny to remain to the last hour the same absolute and romantic lover, who had shown to his new

bride the flagdraped vessels in the Mersey. No fate is altogether easy; but trials are our touchstone, trials

overcome our reward; and it was given to Fleeming to conquer. It was given to him to live for another, not as

a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure. 'People may write novels,' he wrote in 1869, 'and other

people may write poems, but not a man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man may be,

who is desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage.' And again in 1885, after more than

twentysix years of marriage, and within but five weeks of his death: 'Your first letter from Bournemouth,' he

wrote, 'gives me heavenly pleasure for which I thank Heaven and you too who are my heaven on earth.'

The mind hesitates whether to say that such a man has been more good or more fortunate.

Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable mind of maturity than any man; and Jenkin

was to the end of a most deliberate growth. In the next chapter, when I come to deal with his telegraphic

voyages and give some taste of his correspondence, the reader will still find him at twentyfive an arrant

schoolboy. His wife besides was more thoroughly educated than he. In many ways she was able to teach

him, and he proud to be taught; in many ways she outshone him, and he delighted to be outshone. All these

superiorities, and others that, after the manner of lovers, he no doubt forged for himself, added as time went

on to the humility of his original love. Only once, in all I know of his career, did he show a touch of

smallness. He could not learn to sing correctly; his wife told him so and desisted from her lessons; and the

mortification was so sharply felt that for years he could not be induced to go to a concert, instanced himself

as a typical man without an ear, and never sang again. I tell it; for the fact that this stood singular in his

behaviour, and really amazed all who knew him, is the happiest way I can imagine to commend the tenor of

his simplicity; and because it illustrates his feeling for his wife. Others were always welcome to laugh at him;

if it amused them, or if it amused him, he would proceed undisturbed with his occupation, his vanity

invulnerable. With his wife it was different: his wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty years the fibre

ached. Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on

earth with whom he was the most familiar. He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping vivacity

and roughness and he was never forgetful of his first visit to the Austins and the vow he had registered on his

return. There was thus an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might almost raise a smile. But it

stood on noble grounds; for this was how he sought to shelter from his own petulance the woman who was to

I wish in this chapter to chronicle small beer; taking a hasty glance at some ten years of married life and of

professional struggle; and reserving till the next all the more interesting matter of his cruises. Of his

achievements and their worth, it is not for me to speak: his friend and partner, Sir William Thomson, has

contributed a note on the subject, which will be found in the Appendix, and to which I must refer the reader.

He is to conceive in the meanwhile for himself Fleeming's manifold engagements: his service on the

Committee on Electrical Standards, his lectures on electricity at Chatham, his chair at the London University,

his partnership with Sir William Thomson and Mr. Varley in many ingenious patents, his growing credit with

engineers and men of science; and he is to bear in mind that of all this activity and acquist of reputation, the

immediate profit was scanty. Soon after his marriage, Fleeming had left the service of Messrs. Liddell

Gordon, and entered into a general engineering partnership with Mr. Forde, a gentleman in a good way of

business. It was a fortunate partnership in this, that the parties retained their mutual respect unlessened and

separated with regret; but men's affairs, like men, have their times of sickness, and by one of these

unaccountable variations, for hard upon ten years the business was disappointing and the profits meagre.

'Inditing drafts of German railways which will never get made': it is thus I find Fleeming, not without a touch

of bitterness, describe his occupation. Even the patents hung fire at first. There was no salary to rely on;

children were coming and growing up; the prospect was often anxious. In the days of his courtship, Fleeming

had written to Miss Austin a dissuasive picture of the trials of poverty, assuring her these were no figments

but truly bitter to support; he told her this, he wrote, beforehand, so that when the pinch came and she

suffered, she should not be disappointed in herself nor tempted to doubt her own magnanimity: a letter of

admirable wisdom and solicitude. But now that the trouble came, he bore it very lightly. It was his principle,

as he once prettily expressed it, 'to enjoy each day's happiness, as it arises, like birds or children.' His

optimism, if driven out at the door, would come in again by the window; if it found nothing but blackness in

the present, would hit upon some ground of consolation in the future or the past. And his courage and energy

were indefatigable. In the year 1863, soon after the birth of their first son, they moved into a cottage at

Claygate near Esher; and about this time, under manifold troubles both of money and health, I find him

writing from abroad: 'The country will give us, please God, health and strength. I will love and cherish you

more than ever, you shall go where you wish, you shall receive whom you wish and as for money you shall

have that too. I cannot be mistaken. I have now measured myself with many men. I do not feel weak, I do not

feel that I shall fail. In many things I have succeeded, and I will in this. And meanwhile the time of waiting,

which, please Heaven, shall not be long, shall also not be so bitter. Well, well, I promise much, and do not

know at this moment how you and the dear child are. If he is but better, courage, my girl, for I see light.'

This cottage at Claygate stood just without the village, well surrounded with trees and commanding a

pleasant view. A piece of the garden was turfed over to form a croquet green, and Fleeming became (I need

scarce say) a very ardent player. He grew ardent, too, in gardening. This he took up at first to please his wife,

having no natural inclination; but he had no sooner set his hand to it, than, like everything else he touched, it

became with him a passion. He budded roses, he potted cuttings in the coachhouse; if there came a change

of weather at night, he would rise out of bed to protect his favourites; when he was thrown with a dull

companion, it was enough for him to discover in the man a fellow gardener; on his travels, he would go out of

his way to visit nurseries and gather hints; and to the end of his life, after other occupations prevented him

putting his own hand to the spade, he drew up a yearly programme for his gardener, in which all details were

regulated. He had begun by this time to write. His paper on Darwin, which had the merit of convincing on

one point the philosopher himself, had indeed been written before this in London lodgings; but his pen was

not idle at Claygate; and it was here he wrote (among other things) that review of 'FECUNDITY,

FERTILITY, STERILITY, AND ALLIED TOPICS,' which Dr. Matthews Duncan prefixed by way of

introduction to the second edition of the work. The mere act of writing seems to cheer the vanity of the most

incompetent; but a correction accepted by Darwin, and a whole review borrowed and reprinted by Matthews

Duncan are compliments of a rare strain, and to a man still unsuccessful must have been precious indeed.

There was yet a third of the same kind in store for him; and when Munro himself owned that he had found

instruction in the paper on Lucretius, we may say that Fleeming had been crowned in the capitol of

Croquet, charades, Christmas magic lanterns for the village children, an amateur concert or a review article in

the evening; plenty of hard work by day; regular visits to meetings of the British Association, from one of

which I find him characteristically writing: 'I cannot say that I have had any amusement yet, but I am

enjoying the dulness and dry bustle of the whole thing'; occasional visits abroad on business, when he would

find the time to glean (as I have said) gardening hints for himself, and old folksongs or new fashions of

dress for his wife; and the continual study and care of his children: these were the chief elements of his life.

Nor were friends wanting. Captain and Mrs. Jenkin, Mr. and Mrs. Austin, Clerk Maxwell, Miss Bell of

Manchester, and others came to them on visits. Mr. Hertslet of the Foreign Office, his wife and his daughter,

were neighbours and proved kind friends; in 1867 the Howitts came to Claygate and sought the society of 'the

two bright, clever young people'; and in a house close by, Mr. Frederick Ricketts came to live with his

family. Mr. Ricketts was a valued friend during his short life; and when he was lost with every circumstance

I think I shall give the best idea of Fleeming in this time of his early married life, by a few sustained extracts

'NOV. 11. Sunday was too wet to walk to Isleworth, for which I was sorry, so I staid and went to Church

and thought of you at Ardwick all through the Commandments, and heard Dr. expound in a remarkable

way a prophecy of St. Paul's about Roman Catholics, which MUTATIS MUTANDIS would do very well for

Protestants in some parts. Then I made a little nursery of Borecole and Enfield market cabbage, grubbing in

wet earth with leggings and gray coat on. Then I tidied up the coachhouse to my own and Christine's

admiration. Then encouraged by BOUTSRIMES I wrote you a copy of verses; high time I think; I shall just

save my tenth year of knowing my ladylove without inditing poetry or rhymes to her.

'Then I rummaged over the box with my father's letters and found interesting notes from myself. One I should

say my first letter, which little Austin I should say would rejoice to see and shall see with a drawing of a

cottage and a spirited "cob." What was more to the purpose, I found with it a pastecutter which Mary

'Then I read some of Congreve. There are admirable scenes in the manner of Sheridan; all wit and no

character, or rather one character in a great variety of situations and scenes. I could show you some scenes,

but others are too coarse even for my stomach hardened by a course of French novels.

'NOV. 16. Verbenas looking well. . . . I am but a poor creature without you; I have naturally no spirit or fun

or enterprise in me. Only a kind of mechanical capacity for ascertaining whether two really is half four, etc.;

but when you are near me I can fancy that I too shine, and vainly suppose it to be my proper light; whereas by

my extreme darkness when you are not by, it clearly can only be by a reflected brilliance that I seem aught

but dull. Then for the moral part of me: if it were not for you and little Odden, I should feel by no means sure

that I had any affection power in me. . . . Even the muscular me suffers a sad deterioration in your absence. I

don't get up when I ought to, I have snoozed in my chair after dinner; I do not go in at the garden with my

wonted vigour, and feel ten times as tired as usual with a walk in your absence; so you see, when you are not

by, I am a person without ability, affections or vigour, but droop dull, selfish, and spiritless; can you wonder

'NOV. 17. . . . I am very glad we married young. I would not have missed these five years, no, not for any

'NOV. 30. I got through my Chatham lecture very fairly though almost all my apparatus went astray. I

dined at the mess, and got home to Isleworth the same evening; your father very kindly sitting up for me.

'DEC. 1. Back at dear Claygate. Many cuttings flourish, especially those which do honour to your hand.

Your Californian annuals are up and about. Badger is fat, the grass green. . . .

'DEC. 3. Odden will not talk of you, while you are away, having inherited, as I suspect, his father's way of

declining to consider a subject which is painful, as your absence is. . . . I certainly should like to learn Greek

and I think it would be a capital pastime for the long winter evenings. . . . How things are misrated! I declare

croquet is a noble occupation compared to the pursuits of business men. As for socalled idleness that is,

one form of it I vow it is the noblest aim of man. When idle, one can love, one can be good, feel kindly to

all, devote oneself to others, be thankful for existence, educate one's mind, one's heart, one's body. When

busy, as I am busy now or have been busy today, one feels just as you sometimes felt when you were too

'DEC. 5. On Sunday I was at Isleworth, chiefly engaged in playing with Odden. We had the most

enchanting walk together through the brickfields. It was very muddy, and, as he remarked, not fit for Nanna,

but fit for us MEN. The dreary waste of bared earth, thatched sheds and standing water, was a paradise to

him; and when we walked up planks to deserted mixing and crushing mills, and actually saw where the clay

was stirred with long iron prongs, and chalk or lime ground with "a tind of a mill," his expression of

contentment and triumphant heroism knew no limit to its beauty. Of course on returning I found Mrs. Austin

looking out at the door in an anxious manner, and thinking we had been out quite long enough. . . . I am

reading Don Quixote chiefly and am his fervent admirer, but I am so sorry he did not place his affections on a

Dulcinea of somewhat worthier stamp. In fact I think there must be a mistake about it. Don Quixote might

and would serve his lady in most preposterous fashion, but I am sure he would have chosen a lady of merit.

He imagined her to be such no doubt, and drew a charming picture of her occupations by the banks of the

river; but in his other imaginations, there was some kind of peg on which to hang the false costumes he

created; windmills are big, and wave their arms like giants; sheep in the distance are somewhat like an army;

a little boat on the riverside must look much the same whether enchanted or belonging to millers; but except

that Dulcinea is a woman, she bears no resemblance at all to the damsel of his imagination.'

At the time of these letters, the oldest son only was born to them. In September of the next year, with the

birth of the second, Charles Frewen, there befell Fleeming a terrible alarm and what proved to be a lifelong

misfortune. Mrs. Jenkin was taken suddenly and alarmingly ill; Fleeming ran a matter of two miles to fetch

the doctor, and, drenched with sweat as he was, returned with him at once in an open gig. On their arrival at

the house, Mrs. Jenkin half unconsciously took and kept hold of her husband's hand. By the doctor's orders,

windows and doors were set open to create a thorough draught, and the patient was on no account to be

disturbed. Thus, then, did Fleeming pass the whole of that night, crouching on the floor in the draught, and

not daring to move lest he should wake the sleeper. He had never been strong; energy had stood him instead

of vigour; and the result of that night's exposure was flying rheumatism varied by settled sciatica. Sometimes

it quite disabled him, sometimes it was less acute; but he was rarely free from it until his death. I knew him

for many years; for more than ten we were closely intimate; I have lived with him for weeks; and during all

this time, he only once referred to his infirmity and then perforce as an excuse for some trouble he put me to,

and so slightly worded that I paid no heed. This is a good measure of his courage under sufferings of which

none but the untried will think lightly. And I think it worth noting how this optimist was acquainted with

pain. It will seem strange only to the superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles,

which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds that

have conceived of life as a field of ordered duties, not as a chase in which to hunt for gratifications. 'We are

not here to be happy, but to be good'; I wish he had mended the phrase: 'We are not here to be happy, but to

try to be good,' comes nearer the modesty of truth. With such oldfashioned morality, it is possible to get

through life, and see the worst of it, and feel some of the worst of it, and still acquiesce piously and even

gladly in man's fate. Feel some of the worst of it, I say; for some of the rest of the worst is, by this simple

It was in the year 1868, that the clouds finally rose. The business in partnership with Mr. Forde began

suddenly to pay well; about the same time the patents showed themselves a valuable property; and but a little

after, Fleeming was appointed to the new chair of engineering in the University of Edinburgh. Thus, almost at

once, pecuniary embarrassments passed for ever out of his life. Here is his own epilogue to the time at

' . . . . The dear old house at Claygate is not let and the pretty garden a mass of weeds. I feel rather as if we

had behaved unkindly to them. We were very happy there, but now that it is over I am conscious of the

weight of anxiety as to money which I bore all the time. With you in the garden, with Austin in the

coachhouse, with pretty songs in the little, low white room, with the moonlight in the dear room upstairs,

ah, it was perfect; but the long walk, wondering, pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting railway,

and the horrid fusty office with its endless disappointments, they are well gone. It is well enough to fight and

scheme and bustle about in the eager crowd here [in London] for a while now and then, but not for a lifetime.

What I have now is just perfect. Study for winter, action for summer, lovely country for recreation, a pleasant

BUT it is now time to see Jenkin at his life's work. I have before me certain imperfect series of letters written,

as he says, 'at hazard, for one does not know at the time what is important and what is not': the earlier

addressed to Miss Austin, after the betrothal; the later to Mrs. Jenkin the young wife. I should premise that I

have allowed myself certain editorial freedoms, leaving out and splicing together much as he himself did with

the Bona cable: thus edited the letters speak for themselves, and will fail to interest none who love adventure

or activity. Addressed as they were to her whom he called his 'dear engineering pupil,' they give a picture of

his work so clear that a child may understand, and so attractive that I am half afraid their publication may

prove harmful, and still further crowd the ranks of a profession already overcrowded. But their most engaging

quality is the picture of the writer; with his indomitable selfconfidence and courage, his readiness in every

pinch of circumstance or change of plan, and his ever fresh enjoyment of the whole web of human

experience, nature, adventure, science, toil and rest, society and solitude. It should be borne in mind that the

writer of these buoyant pages was, even while he wrote, harassed by responsibility, stinted in sleep and often

struggling with the prostration of seasickness. To this last enemy, which he never overcame, I have omitted,

in my search after condensation, a good many references; if they were all left, such was the man's temper,

they would not represent one hundredth part of what he suffered, for he was never given to complaint. But

indeed he had met this ugly trifle, as he met every thwart circumstance of life, with a certain pleasure of

pugnacity; and suffered it not to check him, whether in the exercise of his profession or the pursuit of

'Well, you should know, Mr. having a contract to lay down a submarine telegraph from Sardinia to Africa

failed three times in the attempt. The distance from land to land is about 140 miles. On the first occasion,

after proceeding some 70 miles, he had to cut the cable the cause I forget; he tried again, same result; then

picked up about 20 miles of the lost cable, spliced on a new piece, and very nearly got across that time, but

ran short of cable, and when but a few miles off Galita in very deep water, had to telegraph to London for

more cable to be manufactured and sent out whilst he tried to stick to the end: for five days, I think, he lay

there sending and receiving messages, but heavy weather coming on the cable parted and Mr. went home in

'He then applied to those eminent engineers, R. S. Newall Co., who made and laid down a cable for him last

autumn Fleeming Jenkin (at the time in considerable mental agitation) having the honour of fitting out the

ELBA for that purpose.' [On this occasion, the ELBA has no cable to lay; but] 'is going out in the beginning

of May to endeavour to fish up the cables Mr. lost. There are two ends at or near the shore: the third will

probably not be found within 20 miles from land. One of these ends will be passed over a very big pulley or

sheave at the bows, passed six times round a big barrel or drum; which will be turned round by a steam

engine on deck, and thus wind up the cable, while the ELBA slowly steams ahead. The cable is not wound

round and round the drum as your silk is wound on its reel, but on the contrary never goes round more than

six times, going off at one side as it comes on at the other, and going down into the hold of the ELBA to be

'I went down to Gateshead to discuss with Mr. Newall the form which this tolerably simple idea should take,

and have been busy since I came here drawing, ordering, and putting up the machinery uninterfered with,

thank goodness, by any one. I own I like responsibility; it flatters one and then, your father might say, I have

more to gain than to lose. Moreover I do like this bloodless, painless combat with wood and iron, forcing the

stubborn rascals to do my will, licking the clumsy cubs into an active shape, seeing the child of today's

'By dint of bribing, bullying, cajoling, and going day by day to see the state of things ordered, all my work is

very nearly ready now; but those who have neglected these precautions are of course disappointed. Five

hundred fathoms of chain [were] ordered by some three weeks since, to be ready by the 10th without fail;

he sends for it today 150 fathoms all they can let us have by the 15th and how the rest is to be got, who

knows? He ordered a boat a month since and yesterday we could see nothing of her but the keel and about

two planks. I could multiply instances without end. At first one goes nearly mad with vexation at these

things; but one finds so soon that they are the rule, that then it becomes necessary to feign a rage one does not

feel. I look upon it as the natural order of things, that if I order a thing, it will not be done if by accident it

gets done, it will certainly be done wrong: the only remedy being to watch the performance at every stage.

'Today was a grand fieldday. I had steam up and tried the engine against pressure or resistance. One part of

the machinery is driven by a belt or strap of leather. I always had my doubts this might slip; and so it did,

wildly. I had made provision for doubling it, putting on two belts instead of one. No use off they went,

slipping round and off the pulleys instead of driving the machinery. Tighten them no use. More strength

there down with the lever smash something, tear the belts, but get them tight now then, stand clear, on

with the steam; and the belts slip away as if nothing held them. Men begin to look queer; the circle of

quidnuncs make sage remarks. Once more no use. I begin to know I ought to feel sheepish and beat, but

somehow I feel cocky instead. I laugh and say, "Well, I am bound to break something down" and suddenly

see. "Oho, there's the place; get weight on there, and the belt won't slip." With much labour, on go the belts

again. "Now then, a spar thro' there and six men's weight on; mind you're not carried away." "Ay, ay, sir."

But evidently no one believes in the plan. "Hurrah, round she goes stick to your spar. All right, shut off

'This or such as this (not always quite so bad) occurs hour after hour, while five hundred tons of coal are

rattling down into the holds and bunkers, riveters are making their infernal row all round, and riggers bend

the sails and fit the rigging: a sort of Pandemonium, it appeared to young Mrs. Newall, who was here on

'We are delayed in the river by some of the ship's papers not being ready. Such a scene at the dock gates. Not

a sailor will join till the last moment; and then, just as the ship forges ahead through the narrow pass, beds

and baggage fly on board, the men half tipsy clutch at the rigging, the captain swears, the women scream and

sob, the crowd cheer and laugh, while one or two pretty little girls stand still and cry outright, regardless of all

'These two days of comparative peace have quite set me on my legs again. I was getting worn and weary with

anxiety and work. As usual I have been delighted with my shipwrights. I gave them some beer on Saturday,

making a short oration. Today when they went ashore and I came on board, they gave three cheers, whether

for me or the ship I hardly know, but I had just bid them goodbye, and the ship was out of hail; but I was

'My first intentions of a long journal have been fairly frustrated by seasickness. On Tuesday last about noon

we started from the Mersey in very dirty weather, and were hardly out of the river when we met a gale from

the southwest and a heavy sea, both right in our teeth; and the poor ELBA had a sad shaking. Had I not been

very seasick, the sight would have been exciting enough, as I sat wrapped in my oilskins on the bridge; [but]

in spite of all my efforts to talk, to eat, and to grin, I soon collapsed into imbecility; and I was heartily

'Next morning, I fancied it grew quieter and, as I listened, heard, "Let go the anchor," whereon I concluded

we had run into Holyhead Harbour, as was indeed the case. All that day we lay in Holyhead, but I could

neither read nor write nor draw. The captain of another steamer which had put in came on board, and we all

went for a walk on the hill; and in the evening there was an exchange of presents. We gave some tobacco I

think, and received a cat, two pounds of fresh butter, a Cumberland ham, WESTWARD HO! and Thackeray's

ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. I was astonished at receiving two such fair books from the captain of a little

coasting screw. Our captain said he [the captain of the screw] had plenty of money, five or six hundred a year

at least. "What in the world makes him go rolling about in such a craft, then?" "Why, I fancy he's

reckless; he's desperate in love with that girl I mentioned, and she won't look at him." Our honest, fat, old

'My head won't stand much writing yet, so I will run up and take a look at the blue night sky off the coast of

'A nice lad of some two and twenty, A by name, goes out in a nondescript capacity as part purser, part

telegraph clerk, part generally useful person. A was a great comfort during the miseries [of the gale]; for

when with a dead head wind and a heavy sea, plates, books, papers, stomachs were being rolled about in sad

confusion, we generally managed to lie on our backs, and grin, and try discordant staves of the FLOWERS

OF THE FOREST and the LOW BACKED CAR. We could sing and laugh, when we could do nothing else;

though A was ready to swear after each fit was past, that that was the first time he had felt anything, and at

this moment would declare in broad Scotch that he'd never been sick at all, qualifying the oath with "except

for a minute now and then." He brought a cornetapiston to practice on, having had three weeks'

instructions on that melodious instrument; and if you could hear the horrid sounds that come! especially at

heavy rolls. When I hint he is not improving, there comes a confession: "I don't feel quite right yet, you see!"

'Long past Cape St. Vincent now. We went within about 400 yards of the cliffs and lighthouse in a calm

moonlight, with porpoises springing from the sea, the men crooning long ballads as they lay idle on the

forecastle and the sails flapping uncertain on the yards. As we passed, there came a sudden breeze from land,

hot and heavy scented; and now as I write its warm rich flavour contrasts strongly with the salt air we have

'I paced the deck with H, the second mate, and in the quiet night drew a confession that he was engaged to

be married, and gave him a world of good advice. He is a very nice, active, little fellow, with a broad Scotch

tongue and "dirty, little rascal" appearance. He had a sad disappointment at starting. Having been second

mate on the last voyage, when the first mate was discharged, he took charge of the ELBA all the time she was

in port, and of course looked forward to being chief mate this trip. Liddell promised him the post. He had not

authority to do this; and when Newall heard of it, he appointed another man. Fancy poor Hhaving told all

the men and most of all, his sweetheart. But more remains behind; for when it came to signing articles, it

turned out that O, the new first mate, had not a certificate which allowed him to have a second mate. Then

came rather an affecting scene. For H proposed to sign as chief (he having the necessary higher certificate)

but to act as second for the lower wages. At first O would not give in, but offered to go as second. But our

brave little H said, no: "The owners wished Mr. O to be chief mate, and chief mate he should be." So he

carried the day, signed as chief and acts as second. Shakespeare and Byron are his favourite books. I walked

into Byron a little, but can well understand his stirring up a rough, young sailor's romance. I lent him

WESTWARD HO from the cabin; but to my astonishment he did not care much for it; he said it smelt of the

shilling railway library; perhaps I had praised it too highly. Scott is his standard for novels. I am very happy

to find good taste by no means confined to gentlemen, H having no pretensions to that title. He is a man

'Then I came down to the cabin and heard young A's schemes for the future. His highest picture is a

commission in the Prince of Vizianagram's irregular horse. His eldest brother is tutor to his Highness's

children, and grand vizier, and magistrate, and on his Highness's household staff, and seems to be one of

those Scotch adventurers one meets with and hears of in queer berths raising cavalry, building palaces, and

'I read your letter carefully, leaning back in a Maltese boat to present the smallest surface of my body to a

grilling sun, and sailing from the ELBA to Cape Hamrah about three miles distant. How we fried and sighed!

At last, we reached land under Fort Genova, and I was carried ashore pickaback, and plucked the first

flower I saw for Annie. It was a strange scene, far more novel than I had imagined: the high, steep banks

covered with rich, spicy vegetation of which I hardly knew one plant. The dwarf palm with fanlike leaves,

growing about two feet high, formed the staple of the verdure. As we brushed through them, the gummy

leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes; and with its small white flower and yellow heart, stood for our English

dogrose. In place of heather, we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves somewhat similar. That large bulb

with long flat leaves? Do not touch it if your hands are cut; the Arabs use it as blisters for their horses. Is that

the same sort? No, take that one up; it is the bulb of a dwarf palm, each layer of the onion peels off, brown

and netted, like the outside of a cocoanut. It is a clever plant that; from the leaves we get a vegetable

horsehair; and eat the bottom of the centre spike. All the leaves you pull have the same aromatic scent. But

here a little patch of cleared ground shows old friends, who seem to cling by abused civilisation:fine, hardy

thistles, one of them bright yellow, though; honest, Scotch looking, large daisies or gowans; potatoes

here and there, looking but sickly; and dark sturdy figtrees looking cool and at their ease in the burning sun.

'Here we are at Fort Genova, crowning the little point, a small old building, due to my old Genoese

acquaintance who fought and traded bravely once upon a time. A broken cannon of theirs forms the

threshold; and through a dark, low arch, we enter upon broad terraces sloping to the centre, from which rain

water may collect and run into that well. Largebreeched French troopers lounge about and are most civil;

and the whole party sit down to breakfast in a little whitewashed room, from the door of which the long,

mountain coastline and the sparkling sea show of an impossible blue through the openings of a whitewashed

rampart. I try a seaegg, one of those prickly fellows seaurchins, they are called sometimes; the shell is of

a lovely purple, and when opened, there are rays of yellow adhering to the inside; these I eat, but they are

'We are silent and shy of one another, and soon go out to watch while turbaned, bluebreeched, barelegged

Arabs dig holes for the land telegraph posts on the following principle: one man takes a pick and bangs lazily

at the hard earth; when a little is loosened, his mate with a small spade lifts it on one side; and DA CAPO.

They have regular features and look quite in place among the palms. Our English workmen screw the

earthenware insulators on the posts, strain the wire, and order Arabs about by the generic term of Johnny. I

find W has nothing for me to do; and that in fact no one has anything to do. Some instruments for testing

have stuck at Lyons, some at Cagliari; and nothing can be done or at any rate, is done. I wander about,

thinking of you and staring at big, green grasshoppers locusts, some people call them and smelling the

rich brushwood. There was nothing for a pencil to sketch, and I soon got tired of this work, though I have

'At two this morning, we left Cagliari; at five cast anchor here. I got up and began preparing for the final trial;

and shortly afterwards everyone else of note on board went ashore to make experiments on the state of the

cable, leaving me with the prospect of beginning to lift at 12 o'clock. I was not ready by that time; but the

experiments were not concluded and moreover the cable was found to be imbedded some four or five feet in

sand, so that the boat could not bring off the end. At three, Messrs. Liddell, came on board in good spirits,

having found two wires good or in such a state as permitted messages to be transmitted freely. The boat now

went to grapple for the cable some way from shore while the ELBA towed a small lateen craft which was to

take back the consul to Cagliari some distance on its way. On our return we found the boat had been

unsuccessful; she was allowed to drop astern, while we grappled for the cable in the ELBA [without more

success]. The coast is a low mountain range covered with brushwood or heather pools of water and a sandy

beach at their feet. I have not yet been ashore, my hands having been very full all day.

'Grappling for the cable outside the bank had been voted too uncertain; [and the day was spent in] efforts to

pull the cable off through the sand which has accumulated over it. By getting the cable tight on to the boat,

and letting the swell pitch her about till it got slack, and then tightening again with blocks and pulleys, we

managed to get out from the beach towards the ship at the rate of about twenty yards an hour. When they had

got about 100 yards from shore, we ran round in the ELBA to try and help them, letting go the anchor in the

shallowest possible water, this was about sunset. Suddenly someone calls out he sees the cable at the bottom:

there it was sure enough, apparently wriggling about as the waves rippled. Great excitement; still greater

when we find our own anchor is foul of it and has been the means of bringing it to light. We let go a grapnel,

get the cable clear of the anchor on to the grapnel the captain in an agony lest we should drift ashore

meanwhile hand the grappling line into the big boat, steam out far enough, and anchor again. A little more

work and one end of the cable is up over the bows round my drum. I go to my engine and we start hauling in.

All goes pretty well, but it is quite dark. Lamps are got at last, and men arranged. We go on for a quarter of a

mile or so from shore and then stop at about halfpast nine with orders to be up at three. Grand work at last!

A number of the SATURDAY REVIEW here; it reads so hot and feverish, so tomblike and unhealthy, in the

midst of dear Nature's hills and sea, with good wholesome work to do. Pray that all go well to morrow.

'Thank heaven for a most fortunate day. At three o'clock this morning in a damp, chill mist all hands were

roused to work. With a small delay, for one or two improvements I had seen to be necessary last night, the

engine started and since that time I do not think there has been half an hour's stoppage. A rope to splice, a

block to change, a wheel to oil, an old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable which brought it up, these

have been our only obstructions. Sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty revolutions at last,

my little engine tears away. The even black rope comes straight out of the blue heaving water: passes slowly

round an openhearted, goodtempered looking pulley, five feet diameter; aft past a vicious nipper, to bring

all up should anything go wrong; through a gentle guide; on to a huge bluff drum, who wraps him round his

body and says "Come you must," as plain as drum can speak: the chattering pauls say "I've got him, I've got

him, he can't get back:" whilst black cable, much slacker and easier in mind and body, is taken by a slim

Vpulley and passed down into the huge hold, where half a dozen men put him comfortably to bed after his

exertion in rising from his long bath. In good sooth, it is one of the strangest sights I know to see that black

fellow rising up so steadily in the midst of the blue sea. We are more than half way to the place where we

expect the fault; and already the one wire, supposed previously to be quite bad near the African coast, can be

spoken through. I am very glad I am here, for my machines are my own children and I look on their little

failings with a parent's eye and lead them into the path of duty with gentleness and firmness. I am naturally in

good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes may arise at any instant; moreover tomorrow my

payingout apparatus will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another nervous operation. Fifteen

miles are safely in; but no one knows better than I do that nothing is done till all is done.

'9 A.M. We have reached the splice supposed to be faulty, and no fault has been found. The two men

'EVENING. A weary day in a hot broiling sun; no air. After the experiments, L said the fault might be ten

miles ahead: by that time, we should be according to a chart in about a thousand fathoms of water rather

more than a mile. It was most difficult to decide whether to go on or not. I made preparations for a heavy

pull, set small things to rights and went to sleep. About four in the afternoon, Mr. Liddell decided to proceed,

and we are now (at seven) grinding it in at the rate of a mile and threequarters per hour, which appears a

grand speed to us. If the payingout only works well! I have just thought of a great improvement in it; I can't

apply it this time, however. The sea is of an oily calm, and a perfect fleet of brigs and ships surrounds us,

their sails hardly filling in the lazy breeze. The sun sets behind the dim coast of the Isola San Pietro, the coast

of Sardinia high and rugged becomes softer and softer in the distance, while to the westward still the isolated

rock of Toro springs from the horizon. It would amuse you to see how cool (in head) and jolly everybody

is. A testy word now and then shows the wires are strained a little, but everyone laughs and makes his little

jokes as if it were all in fun: yet we are all as much in earnest as the most earnest of the earnest bastard

'5.30 A.M. Out of sight of land: about thirty nautical miles in the hold; the wind rising a little; experiments

being made for a fault, while the engine slowly revolves to keep us hanging at the same spot: depth supposed

about a mile. The machinery has behaved admirably. Oh! that the payingout were over! The new machinery

there is but rough, meant for an experiment in shallow water, and here we are in a mile of water.

'6.30. I have made my calculations and find the new payingout gear cannot possibly answer at this depth,

some portion would give way. Luckily, I have brought the old things with me and am getting them rigged up

as fast as may be. Bad news from the cable. Number four has given in some portion of the last ten miles: the

fault in number three is still at the bottom of the sea: number two is now the only good wire and the hold is

getting in such a mess, through keeping bad bits out and cutting for splicing and testing, that there will be

great risk in paying out. The cable is somewhat strained in its ascent from one mile below us; what it will be

'9 P.M. A most provoking unsatisfactory day. We have done nothing. The wind and sea have both risen.

Too little notice has been given to the telegraphists who accompany this expedition; they had to leave all their

instruments at Lyons in order to arrive at Bona in time; our tests are therefore of the roughest, and no one

really knows where the faults are. Mr. L in the morning lost much time; then he told us, after we had been

inactive for about eight hours, that the fault in number three was within six miles; and at six o'clock in the

evening, when all was ready for a start to pick up these six miles, he comes and says there must be a fault

about thirty miles from Bona! By this time it was too late to begin paying out today, and we must lie here

moored in a thousand fathoms till light tomorrow morning. The ship pitches a good deal, but the wind is

'The wind has not gone down, however. It now (at 10.30) blows a pretty stiff gale, the sea has also risen; and

the ELBA'S bows rise and fall about 9 feet. We make twelve pitches to the minute, and the poor cable must

feel very seasick by this time. We are quite unable to do anything, and continue riding at anchor in one

thousand fathoms, the engines going constantly so as to keep the ship's bows up to the cable, which by this

means hangs nearly vertical and sustains no strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the

vessel. We were all up at four, but the weather entirely forbade work for today, so some went to bed and

most lay down, making up our leeway as we nautically term our loss of sleep. I must say Liddell is a fine

fellow and keeps his patience and temper wonderfully; and yet how he does fret and fume about trifles at

home! This wind has blown now for 36 hours, and yet we have telegrams from Bona to say the sea there is as

calm as a mirror. It makes one laugh to remember one is still tied to the shore. Click, click, click, the pecker

is at work: I wonder what Herr P says to Herr L, tests, tests, tests, nothing more. This will be a very

'9.30. The wind has gone down a deal; but even now there are doubts whether we shall start today. When

'9 P.M. Four miles from land. Our run has been successful and eventless. Now the work is nearly over I feel

a little out of spirits why, I should be puzzled to say mere wantonness, or reaction perhaps after suspense.

'Up this morning at three, coupled my selfacting gear to the brake and had the satisfaction of seeing it pay

out the last four miles in very good style. With one or two little improvements, I hope to make it a capital

thing. The end has just gone ashore in two boats, three out of four wires good. Thus ends our first expedition.

By some odd chance a TIMES of June the 7th has found its way on board through the agency of a wretched

old peasant who watches the end of the line here. A long account of breakages in the Atlantic trial trip.

Tonight we grapple for the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile. I long to have a tug at him; he may puzzle

me, and though misfortunes or rather difficulties are a bore at the time, life when working with cables is tame

'2 P.M. Hurrah, he is hooked, the big fellow, almost at the first cast. He hangs under our bows looking so

'We went to a little bay called Chia, where a freshwater stream falls into the sea, and took in water. This is

rather a long operation, so I went a walk up the valley with Mr. Liddell. The coast here consists of rocky

mountains 800 to 1,000 feet high covered with shrubs of a brilliant green. On landing our first amusement

was watching the hundreds of large fish who lazily swam in shoals about the river; the big canes on the

further side hold numberless tortoises, we are told, but see none, for just now they prefer taking a siesta. A

little further on, and what is this with large pink flowers in such abundance? the oleander in full flower. At

first I fear to pluck them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line

of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green. Set these in a little valley, framed by mountains

whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours such as preRaphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard

and weirdlike amongst the clumps of castoroil plants, oistus, arbor vitae and many other evergreens, whose

names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep or brilliant green. Large herds of cattle

browse on the baked deposit at the foot of these large crags. One or two halfsavage herdsmen in sheepskin

kilts, ask for cigars; partridges whirr up on either side of us; pigeons coo and nightingales sing amongst the

blooming oleander. We get six sheep and many fowls, too, from the priest of the small village; and then run

'The big cable is stubborn and will not behave like his smaller brother. The gear employed to take him off the

drum is not strong enough; he gets slack on the drum and plays the mischief. Luckily for my own conscience,

the gear I had wanted was negatived by Mr. Newall. Mr. Liddell does not exactly blame me, but he says we

might have had a silver pulley cheaper than the cost of this delay. He has telegraphed for more men to

Cagliari, to try to pull the cable off the drum into the hold, by hand. I look as comfortable as I can, but feel as

if people were blaming me. I am trying my best to get something rigged which may help us; I wanted a little

difficulty, and feel much better. The short length we have picked up was covered at places with beautiful

sprays of coral, twisted and twined with shells of those small, fairy animals we saw in the aquarium at home;

poor little things, they died at once, with their little bells and delicate bright tints.

'12 O'CLOCK. Hurrah, victory! for the present anyhow. Whilst in our first dejection, I thought I saw a

place where a flat roller would remedy the whole misfortune; but a flat roller at Cape Spartivento, hard, easily

unshipped, running freely! There was a grooved pulley used for the payingout machinery with a spindle

wheel, which might suit me. I filled him up with tarry spunyarn, nailed sheet copper round him, bent some

parts in the fire; and we are payingin without more trouble now. You would think some one would praise

me; no, no more praise than blame before; perhaps now they think better of me, though.

'10 P.M. We have gone on very comfortably for nearly six miles. An hour and a half was spent washing

down; for along with many coloured polypi, from corals, shells and insects, the big cable brings up much

mud and rust, and makes a fishy smell by no means pleasant: the bottom seems to teem with life. But now

we are startled by a most unpleasant, grinding noise; which appeared at first to come from the large low

pulley, but when the engines stopped, the noise continued; and we now imagine it is something slipping

down the cable, and the pulley but acts as soundingboard to the big fiddle. Whether it is only an anchor or

one of the two other cables, we know not. We hope it is not the cable just laid down.

'10 A.M. All our alarm groundless, it would appear: the odd noise ceased after a time, and there was no

mark sufficiently strong on the large cable to warrant the suspicion that we had cut another line through. I

stopped up on the lookout till three in the morning, which made 23 hours between sleep and sleep. One goes

dozing about, though, most of the day, for it is only when something goes wrong that one has to look alive.

Hour after hour, I stand on the forecastlehead, picking off little specimens of polypi and coral, or lie on the

saloon deck reading back numbers of the TIMES till something hitches, and then all is hurlyburly once

more. There are awnings all along the ship, and a most ancient, fishlike smell beneath.

'1 O'CLOCK. Suddenly a great strain in only 95 fathoms of water belts surging and general dismay;

grapnels being thrown out in the hope of finding what holds the cable. Should it prove the young cable! We

are apparently crossing its path not the working one, but the lost child; Mr. Liddell WOULD start the big

one first though it was laid first: he wanted to see the job done, and meant to leave us to the small one

'3.30. Grapnel caught something, lost it again; it left its marks on the prongs. Started lifting gear again; and

after hauling in some 50 fathoms grunt, grunt, grunt we hear the other cable slipping down our big one,

'10 P.M. The pull on the deck engines became harder and harder. I got steam up in a boiler on deck, and

another little engine starts hauling at the grapnel. I wonder if there ever was such a scene of confusion: Mr.

Liddell and W and the captain all giving orders contradictory, on the forecastle; D, the foreman of our

men, the mates, following the example of our superiors; the ship's engine and boilers below, a 50horse

engine on deck, a boiler 14 feet long on deck beside it, a little steam winch tearing round; a dozen Italians (20

have come to relieve our hands, the men we telegraphed for to Cagliari) hauling at the rope; wiremen, sailors,

in the crevices left by ropes and machinery; everything that could swear swearing I found myself swearing

like a trooper at last. We got the unknown difficulty within ten fathoms of the surface; but then the forecastle

got frightened that, if it was the small cable which we had got hold of, we should certainly break it by

continuing the tremendous and increasing strain. So at last Mr. Liddell decided to stop; cut the big cable,

buoying its end; go back to our pleasant wateringplace at Chia, take more water and start lifting the small

cable. The end of the large one has even now regained its sandy bed; and three buoys one to grapnel foul of

the supposed small cable, two to the big cable are dipping about on the surface. One more a flagbuoy

'It is an illwind, I have an unexpected opportunity of forwarding this engineering letter; for the craft which

brought out our Italian sailors must return to Cagliari tonight, as the little cable will take us nearly to Galita,

and the Italian skipper could hardly find his way from thence. Today Sunday not much rest. Mr. Liddell

is at Spartivento telegraphing. We are at Chia, and shall shortly go to help our boat's crew in getting the small

cable on board. We dropped them some time since in order that they might dig it out of the sand as far as

'Yesterday Sunday as it was all hands were kept at work all day, coaling, watering, and making a futile

attempt to pull the cable from the shore on board through the sand. This attempt was rather silly after the

experience we had gained at Cape Spartivento. This morning we grappled, hooked the cable at once, and

have made an excellent start. Though I have called this the small cable, it is much larger than the Bona one.

'We got over it, however; but it is a warning to me that my future difficulties will arise from parts wearing

out. Yesterday the cable was often a lovely sight, coming out of the water one large incrustation of delicate,

netlike corals and long, white curling shells. No portion of the dirty black wires was visible; instead we had

a garland of soft pink with little scarlet sprays and white enamel intermixed. All was fragile, however, and

could hardly be secured in safety; and inexorable iron crushed the tender leaves to atoms. This morning at

the end of my watch, about 4 o'clock, we came to the buoys, proving our anticipations right concerning the

crossing of the cables. I went to bed for four hours, and on getting up, found a sad mess. A tangle of the

sixwire cable hung to the grapnel which had been left buoyed, and the small cable had parted and is lost for

'We contrived to get the two ends of the large cable and to pick the short end up. The long end, leading us

seaward, was next put round the drum and a mile of it picked up; but then, fearing another tangle, the end was

cut and buoyed, and we returned to grapple for the threewire cable. All this is very tiresome for me. The

buoying and dredging are managed entirely by W, who has had much experience in this sort of thing; so I

have not enough to do and get very homesick. At noon the wind freshened and the sea rose so high that we

'The whole day spent in dredging without success. This operation consists in allowing the ship to drift slowly

across the line where you expect the cable to be, while at the end of a long rope, fast either to the bow or

stern, a grapnel drags along the ground. This grapnel is a small anchor, made like four pothooks tied back to

back. When the rope gets taut, the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up to the surface in the hopes of

finding the cable on its prongs. I am much discontented with myself for idly lounging about and reading

WESTWARD HO! for the second time, instead of taking to electricity or picking up nautical information. I

am uncommonly idle. The sea is not quite so rough, but the weather is squally and the rain comes in frequent

'Today about 1 o'clock we hooked the threewire cable, buoyed the long sea end, and picked up the short

[or shore] end. Now it is dark and we must wait for morning before lifting the buoy we lowered today and

proceeding seawards. The depth of water here is about 600 feet, the height of a respectable English hill; our

fishing line was about a quarter of a mile long. It blows pretty fresh, and there is a great deal of sea.

'This morning it came on to blow so heavily that it was impossible to take up our buoy. The ELBA

'This morning was a beautiful calm. We reached the buoys at about 4.30 and commenced picking up at 6.30.

Shortly a new cause of anxiety arose. Kinks came up in great quantities, about thirty in the hour. To have a

true conception of a kink, you must see one: it is a loop drawn tight, all the wires get twisted and the gutta

percha inside pushed out. These much diminish the value of the cable, as they must all be cut out, the

guttapercha made good, and the cable spliced. They arise from the cable having been badly laid down so

that it forms folds and tails at the bottom of the sea. These kinks have another disadvantage: they weaken the

cable very much. At about six o'clock [P.M.] we had some twelve miles lifted, when I went to the bows; the

kinks were exceedingly tight and were giving way in a most alarming manner. I got a cage rigged up to

prevent the end (if it broke) from hurting anyone, and sat down on the bowsprit, thinking I should describe

kinks to Annie: suddenly I saw a great many coils and kinks altogether at the surface. I jumped to the

guttapercha pipe, by blowing through which the signal is given to stop the engine. I blow, but the engine

does not stop; again no answer: the coils and kinks jam in the bows and I rush aft shouting stop. Too late:

the cable had parted and must lie in peace at the bottom. Someone had pulled the guttapercha tube across a

bare part of the steam pipe and melted it. It had been used hundreds of times in the last few days and gave no

symptoms of failing. I believe the cable must have gone at any rate; however, since it went in my watch and

'Since I could not go to Annie I took down Shakespeare, and by the time I had finished ANTONY AND

CLEOPATRA, read the second half of TROILUS and got some way in CORIOLANUS, I felt it was childish

to regret the accident had happened in my watch, and moreover I felt myself not much to blame in the tubing

matter it had been torn down, it had not fallen down; so I went to bed, and slept without fretting, and woke

this morning in the same good mood for which thank you and our friend Shakespeare. I am happy to say

Mr. Liddell said the loss of the cable did not much matter; though this would have been no consolation had I

felt myself to blame. This morning we have grappled for and found another length of small cable which

Mr. dropped in 100 fathoms of water. If this also gets full of kinks, we shall probably have to cut it after 10

miles or so, or more probably still it will part of its own free will or weight.

'10 P.M. This second length of threewire cable soon got into the same condition as its fellow i.e. came

up twenty kinks an hour and after seven miles were in, parted on the pulley over the bows at one of the said

kinks; during my watch again, but this time no earthly power could have saved it. I had taken all manner of

precautions to prevent the end doing any damage when the smash came, for come I knew it must. We now

return to the sixwire cable. As I sat watching the cable tonight, large phosphorescent globes kept rolling

'Today we returned to the buoy we had left at the end of the six wire cable, and after much trouble from a

series of tangles, got a fair start at noon. You will easily believe a tangle of iron rope inch and a half diameter

is not easy to unravel, especially with a ton or so hanging to the ends. It is now eight o'clock and we have

about six and a half miles safe: it becomes very exciting, however, for the kinks are coming fast and furious.

'Twentyeight miles safe in the hold. The ship is now so deep, that the men are to be turned out of their aft

hold, and the remainder coiled there; so the good ELBA'S nose need not burrow too far into the waves. There

'Our first mate was much hurt in securing a buoy on the evening of the 2nd. As interpreter [with the Italians] I

am useful in all these cases; but for no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes continually. Pain is

a terrible thing. Our work is done: the whole of the sixwire cable has been recovered; only a small part of

the threewire, but that wire was bad and, owing to its twisted state, the value small. We may therefore be

I have given this cruise nearly in full. From the notes, unhappily imperfect, of two others, I will take only

specimens; for in all there are features of similarity and it is possible to have too much even of submarine

telegraphy and the romance of engineering. And first from the cruise of 1859 in the Greek Islands and to

'We had a fair wind and we did very well, seeing a little bit of Cerig or Cythera, and lots of turtledoves

wandering about over the sea and perching, tired and timid, in the rigging of our little craft. Then Falconera,

Antimilo, and Milo, topped with huge white clouds, barren, deserted, rising bold and mysterious from the

blue, chafing sea; Argentiera, Siphano, Scapho, Paros, Antiparos, and late at night Syra itself. ADAM

BEDE in one hand, a sketchbook in the other, lying on rugs under an awning, I enjoyed a very pleasant day.

'Syra is semieastern. The pavement, huge shapeless blocks sloping to a central gutter; from this bare

twostoried houses, sometimes plaster many coloured, sometimes roughhewn marble, rise, dirty and

illfinished to straight, plain, flat roofs; shops guiltless of windows, with signs in Greek letters; dogs, Greeks

in blue, baggy, Zouave breeches and a fez, a few narghilehs and a sprinkling of the ordinary continental

shopboys. In the evening I tried one more walk in Syra with A, but in vain endeavoured to amuse myself

or to spend money; the first effort resulting in singing DOODAH to a passing Greek or two, the second in

'On coming on deck, I found we were at anchor in Canea bay, and saw one of the most lovely sights man

could witness. Far on either hand stretch bold mountain capes, Spada and Maleka, tender in colour, bold in

outline; rich sunny levels lie beneath them, framed by the azure sea. Right in front, a dark brown fortress

girdles white mosques and minarets. Rich and green, our mountain capes here join to form a setting for the

town, in whose dark walls still darker open a dozen higharched caves in which the huge Venetian

galleys used to lie in wait. High above all, higher and higher yet, up into the firmament, range after range of

blue and snowcapped mountains. I was bewildered and amazed, having heard nothing of this great beauty.

The town when entered is quite eastern. The streets are formed of open stalls under the first story, in which

squat tailors, cooks, sherbet vendors and the like, busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched

from house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd; curs yelp between your legs; negroes

are as hideous and bright clothed as usual; grave Turks with long chibouques continue to march solemnly

without breaking them; a little Arab in one dirty rag pokes fun at two splendid little Turks with brilliant

fezzes; wiry mountaineers in dirty, full, white kilts, shouldering long guns and one hand on their pistols, stalk

untamed past a dozen Turkish soldiers, who look sheepish and brutal in worn cloth jacket and cotton trousers.

A headless, wingless lion of St. Mark still stands upon a gate, and has left the mark of his strong clutch. Of

ancient times when Crete was Crete, not a trace remains; save perhaps in the full, wellcut nostril and firm

tread of that mountaineer, and I suspect that even his sires were Albanians, mere outer barbarians.

I spent the day at the little station where the cable was landed, which has apparently been first a Venetian

monastery and then a Turkish mosque. At any rate the big dome is very cool, and the little ones hold [our

electric] batteries capitally. A handsome young Bashibazouk guards it, and a still handsomer mountaineer is

the servant; so I draw them and the monastery and the hill, till I'm black in the face with heat and come on

'We arrived in the morning at the east end of Candia, and had a glorious scramble over the mountains which

seem built of adamant. Time has worn away the softer portions of the rock, only leaving sharp jagged edges

of steel. Sea eagles soaring above our heads; old tanks, ruins, and desolation at our feet. The ancient Arsinoe

stood here; a few blocks of marble with the cross attest the presence of Venetian Christians; but now the

desolation of desolations. Mr. Liddell and I separated from the rest, and when we had found a sure bay for the

cable, had a tremendous lively scramble back to the boat. These are the bits of our life which I enjoy, which

'Yesterday we ran round to the new harbour [of Alexandria], landed the shore end of the cable close to

Cleopatra's bath, and made a very satisfactory start about one in the afternoon. We had scarcely gone 200

yards when I noticed that the cable ceased to run out, and I wondered why the ship had stopped. People ran

aft to tell me not to put such a strain on the cable; I answered indignantly that there was no strain; and

suddenly it broke on every one in the ship at once that we were aground. Here was a nice mess. A violent

scirocco blew from the land; making one's skin feel as if it belonged to some one else and didn't fit, making

the horizon dim and yellow with fine sand, oppressing every sense and raising the thermometer 20 degrees in

an hour, but making calm water round us which enabled the ship to lie for the time in safety. The wind might

change at any moment, since the scirocco was only accidental; and at the first wave from seaward bump

would go the poor ship, and there would [might] be an end of our voyage. The captain, without waiting to

sound, began to make an effort to put the ship over what was supposed to be a sandbank; but by the time

soundings were made, this was found to be impossible, and he had only been jamming the poor ELBA faster

on a rock. Now every effort was made to get her astern, an anchor taken out, a rope brought to a winch I had

for the cable, and the engines backed; but all in vain. A small Turkish Government steamer, which is to be

our consort, came to our assistance, but of course very slowly, and much time was occupied before we could

get a hawser to her. I could do no good after having made a chart of the soundings round the ship, and went at

last on to the bridge to sketch the scene. But at that moment the strain from the winch and a jerk from the

Turkish steamer got off the boat, after we had been some hours aground. The carpenter reported that she had

made only two inches of water in one compartment; the cable was still uninjured astern, and our spirits rose;

when, will you believe it? after going a short distance astern, the pilot ran us once more fast aground on what

seemed to me nearly the same spot. The very same scene was gone through as on the first occasion, and dark

came on whilst the wind shifted, and we were still aground. Dinner was served up, but poor Mr. Liddell could

eat very little; and bump, bump, grind, grind, went the ship fifteen or sixteen times as we sat at dinner. The

slight sea, however, did enable us to bump off. This morning we appear not to have suffered in any way; but

a sea is rolling in, which a few hours ago would have settled the poor old ELBA.

'The Alexandria cable has again failed; after paying out twothirds of the distance successfully, an unlucky

touch in deep water snapped the line. Luckily the accident occurred in Mr. Liddell's watch. Though

personally it may not really concern me, the accident weighs like a personal misfortune. Still I am glad I was

present: a failure is probably more instructive than a success; and this experience may enable us to avoid

'We left Syra the morning after our arrival on Saturday the 4th. This we did (first) because we were in a hurry

to do something and (second) because, coming from Alexandria, we had four days' quarantine to perform.

We were all mustered along the side while the doctor counted us; the letters were popped into a little tin box

and taken away to be smoked; the guardians put on board to see that we held no communication with the

shore without them we should still have had four more days' quarantine; and with twelve Greek sailors

besides, we started merrily enough picking up the Canea cable. . . . To our utter dismay, the yarn covering

began to come up quite decayed, and the cable, which when laid should have borne half a ton, was now in

danger of snapping with a tenth part of that strain. We went as slow as possible in fear of a break at every

instant. My watch was from eight to twelve in the morning, and during that time we had barely secured three

miles of cable. Once it broke inside the ship, but I seized hold of it in time the weight being hardly anything

and the line for the nonce was saved. Regular nooses were then planted inboard with men to draw them

taut, should the cable break inboard. A, who should have relieved me, was unwell, so I had to continue my

lookout; and about one o'clock the line again parted, but was again caught in the last noose, with about four

inches to spare. Five minutes afterwards it again parted and was yet once more caught. Mr. Liddell (whom I

had called) could stand this no longer; so we buoyed the line and ran into a bay in Siphano, waiting for calm

weather, though I was by no means of opinion that the slight sea and wind had been the cause of our failures.

All next day (Monday) we lay off Siphano, amusing ourselves on shore with fowling pieces and navy

revolvers. I need not say we killed nothing; and luckily we did not wound any of ourselves. A guardiano

accompanied us, his functions being limited to preventing actual contact with the natives, for they might

come as near and talk as much as they pleased. These isles of Greece are sad, interesting places. They are not

really barren all over, but they are quite destitute of verdure; and tufts of thyme, wild mastic or mint, though

they sound well, are not nearly so pretty as grass. Many little churches, glittering white, dot the islands; most

of them, I believe, abandoned during the whole year with the exception of one day sacred to their patron

saint. The villages are mean, but the inhabitants do not look wretched and the men are good sailors. There is

something in this Greek race yet; they will become a powerful Levantine nation in the course of time. What

a lovely moonlight evening that was! the barren island cutting the clear sky with fantastic outline, marble

cliffs on either hand fairly gleaming over the calm sea. Next day, the wind still continuing, I proposed a

boating excursion and decoyed A, L, and S into accompanying me. We took the little gig, and sailed

away merrily enough round a point to a beautiful white bay, flanked with two glistening little churches,

fronted by beautiful distant islands; when suddenly, to my horror, I discovered the ELBA steaming full speed

out from the island. Of course we steered after her; but the wind that instant ceased, and we were left in a

dead calm. There was nothing for it but to unship the mast, get out the oars and pull. The ship was nearly

certain to stop at the buoy; and I wanted to learn how to take an oar, so here was a chance with a vengeance!

L steered, and we three pulled a broiling pull it was about half way across to Palikandro still we did

come in, pulling an uncommon good stroke, and I had learned to hang on my oar. L had pressed me to let

him take my place; but though I was very tired at the end of the first quarter of an hour, and then every

successive half hour, I would not give in. I nearly paid dear for my obstinacy, however; for in the evening I

The next extracts, and I am sorry to say the last, are from Fleeming's letters of 1860, when he was back at

Bona and Spartivento and for the first time at the head of an expedition. Unhappily these letters are not only

the last, but the series is quite imperfect; and this is the more to be lamented as he had now begun to use a pen

more skilfully, and in the following notes there is at times a touch of real distinction in the manner.

'All Tuesday I spent examining what was on board the ELBA, and trying to start the repairs of the

Spartivento land line, which has been entirely neglected, and no wonder, for no one has been paid for three

months, no, not even the poor guards who have to keep themselves, their horses and their families, on their

pay. Wednesday morning, I started for Spartivento and got there in time to try a good many experiments.

Spartivento looks more wild and savage than ever, but is not without a strange deadly beauty: the hills

covered with bushes of a metallic green with coppery patches of soil in between; the valleys filled with dry

salt mud and a little stagnant water; where that very morning the deer had drunk, where herons, curlews, and

other fowl abound, and where, alas! malaria is breeding with this rain. (No fear for those who do not sleep on

shore.) A little iron hut had been placed there since 1858; but the windows had been carried off, the door

broken down, the roof pierced all over. In it, we sat to make experiments; and how it recalled Birkenhead!

There was Thomson, there was my testing board, the strings of guttapercha; Harry P even, battering with

the batteries; but where was my darling Annie? Whilst I sat feet in sand, with Harry alone inside the hut

mats, coats, and wood to darken the window the others visited the murderous old friar, who is of the order

of Scaloppi, and for whom I brought a letter from his superior, ordering him to pay us attention; but he was

away from home, gone to Cagliari in a boat with the produce of the farm belonging to his convent. Then they

visited the tower of Chia, but could not get in because the door is thirty feet off the ground; so they came

back and pitched a magnificent tent which I brought from the BAHIANA a long time ago and where they

will live (if I mistake not) in preference to the friar's, or the owl and bathaunted tower. MM. T and S

will be left there: T, an intelligent, hardworking Frenchman, with whom I am well pleased; he can speak

English and Italian well, and has been two years at Genoa. S is a French German with a face like an ancient

Gaul, who has been sergeantmajor in the French line and who is, I see, a great, big, muscular FAINEANT.

We left the tent pitched and some stores in charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.

'Certainly, being at the head of things is pleasanter than being subordinate. We all agree very well; and I have

made the testing office into a kind of private room where I can come and write to you undisturbed,

surrounded by my dear, bright brass things which all of them remind me of our nights at Birkenhead. Then I

can work here, too, and try lots of experiments; you know how I like that! and now and then I read

Shakespeare principally. Thank you so much for making me bring him: I think I must get a pocket edition of

'[The town was full?] . . . of redshirted English Garibaldini. A very fine looking set of fellows they are, too:

the officers rather raffish, but with medals Crimean and Indian; the men a very sturdy set, with many lads of

good birth I should say. They still wait their consort the Emperor and will, I fear, be too late to do anything. I

meant to have called on them, but they are all gone into barracks some way from the town, and I have been

'The view from the ramparts was very strange and beautiful. Cagliari rises on a very steep rock, at the mouth

of a wide plain circled by large hills and threequarters filled with lagoons; it looks, therefore, like an old

island citadel. Large heaps of salt mark the border between the sea and the lagoons; thousands of flamingoes

whiten the centre of the huge shallow marsh; hawks hover and scream among the trees under the high

mouldering battlements. A little lower down, the band played. Men and ladies bowed and pranced, the

costumes posed, church bells tinkled, processions processed, the sun set behind thick clouds capping the hills;

'Decidedly I prefer being master to being man: boats at all hours, stewards flying for marmalade, captain

enquiring when ship is to sail, clerks to copy my writing, the boat to steer when we go out I have run her

nose on several times; decidedly, I begin to feel quite a little king. Confound the cable, though! I shall never

'We left Cagliari at 4.30 on the 9th and soon got to Spartivento. I repeated some of my experiments, but

found Thomson, who was to have been my grand standby, would not work on that day in the wretched little

hut. Even if the windows and door had been put in, the wind which was very high made the lamp flicker

about and blew it out; so I sent on board and got old sails, and fairly wrapped the hut up in them; and then we

were as snug as could be, and I left the hut in glorious condition with a nice little stove in it. The tent which

should have been forthcoming from the cure's for the guards, had gone to Cagliari; but I found another, [a]

green, Turkish tent, in the ELBA and soon had him up. The square tent left on the last occasion was standing

all right and tight in spite of wind and rain. We landed provisions, two beds, plates, knives, forks, candles,

cooking utensils, and were ready for a start at 6 P.M.; but the wind meanwhile had come on to blow at such a

rate that I thought better of it, and we stopped. T and S slept ashore, however, to see how they liked it, at

least they tried to sleep, for S the ancient sergeantmajor had a toothache, and T thought the tent was

coming down every minute. Next morning they could only complain of sand and a leaky coffeepot, so I

leave them with a good conscience. The little encampment looked quite picturesque: the green round tent, the

square white tent and the hut all wrapped up in sails, on a sand hill, looking on the sea and masking those

confounded marshes at the back. One would have thought the Cagliaritans were in a conspiracy to frighten

the two poor fellows, who (I believe) will be safe enough if they do not go into the marshes after nightfall. S

brought a little dog to amuse them, such a jolly, ugly little cur without a tail, but full of fun; he will be better

'The wind drove a barque, which had anchored near us for shelter, out to sea. We started, however, at 2 P.M.,

and had a quick passage but a very rough one, getting to Bona by daylight [on the 11th]. Such a place as this

is for getting anything done! The health boat went away from us at 7.30 with W on board; and we heard

nothing of them till 9.30, when W came back with two fat Frenchmen who are to look on on the part of the

Government. They are exactly alike: only one has four bands and the other three round his cap, and so I know

them. Then I sent a boat round to Fort Genois [Fort Genova of 1858], where the cable is landed, with all sorts

of things and directions, whilst I went ashore to see about coals and a room at the fort. We hunted people in

the little square in their shops and offices, but only found them in cafes. One amiable gentleman wasn't up at

9.30, was out at 10, and as soon as he came back the servant said he would go to bed and not get up till 3: he

came, however, to find us at a cafe, and said that, on the contrary, two days in the week he did not do so!

Then my two fat friends must have their breakfast after their "something" at a cafe; and all the shops shut

from 10 to 2; and the post does not open till 12; and there was a road to Fort Genois, only a bridge had been

carried away, At last I got off, and we rowed round to Fort Genois, where my men had put up a capital gipsy

tent with sails, and there was my big board and Thomson's number 5 in great glory. I soon came to the

conclusion there was a break. Two of my faithful Cagliaritans slept all night in the little tent, to guard it and

my precious instruments; and the sea, which was rather rough, silenced my Frenchmen.

'Next day I went on with my experiments, whilst a boat grappled for the cable a little way from shore and

buoyed it where the ELBA could get hold. I brought all back to the ELBA, tried my machinery and was all

ready for a start next morning. But the wretched coal had not come yet; Government permission from Algiers

to be got; lighters, men, baskets, and I know not what forms to be got or got through and everybody asleep!

Coals or no coals, I was determined to start next morning; and start we did at four in the morning, picked up

the buoy with our deck engine, popped the cable across a boat, tested the wires to make sure the fault was not

behind us, and started picking up at 11. Everything worked admirably, and about 2 P.M., in came the fault.

There is no doubt the cable was broken by coral fishers; twice they have had it up to their own knowledge.

'Many men have been ashore today and have come back tipsy, and the whole ship is in a state of quarrel

from top to bottom, and they will gossip just within my hearing. And we have had, moreover, three French

gentlemen and a French lady to dinner, and I had to act host and try to manage the mixtures to their taste. The

good natured little Frenchwoman was most amusing; when I asked her if she would have some apple tart

"MON DIEU," with heroic resignation, "JE VEUX BIEN"; or a little PLOMBODDING "MAIS CE QUE

'Yesterday [after three previous days of useless grappling] was destined to be very eventful. We began

dredging at daybreak and hooked at once every time in rocks; but by capital luck, just as we were deciding it

was no use to continue in that place, we hooked the cable: up it came, was tested, and lo! another complete

break, a quarter of a mile off. I was amazed at my own tranquillity under these disappointments, but I was not

really half so fussy as about getting a cab. Well, there was nothing for it but grappling again, and, as you may

imagine, we were getting about six miles from shore. But the water did not deepen rapidly; we seemed to be

on the crest of a kind of submarine mountain in prolongation of Cape de Gonde, and pretty havoc we must

have made with the crags. What rocks we did hook! No sooner was the grapnel down than the ship was

anchored; and then came such a business: ship's engines going, deck engine thundering, belt slipping, fear of

breaking ropes: actually breaking grapnels. It was always an hour or more before we could get the grapnel

down again. At last we had to give up the place, though we knew we were close to the cable, and go further

to sea in much deeper water; to my great fear, as I knew the cable was much eaten away and would stand but

little strain. Well, we hooked the cable first dredge this time, and pulled it slowly and gently to the top, with

much trepidation. Was it the cable? was there any weight on? it was evidently too small. Imagine my dismay

showing certain signs of a break close by. For a moment I felt provoked, as I thought, "Here we are in deep

water, and the cable will not stand lifting!" I tested at once, and by the very first wire found it had broken

towards shore and was good towards sea. This was of course very pleasant; but from that time to this, though

the wires test very well, not a signal has come from Spartivento. I got the cable into a boat, and a

guttapercha line from the ship to the boat, and we signalled away at a great rate but no signs of life. The

tests, however, make me pretty sure one wire at least is good; so I determined to lay down cable from where

we were to the shore, and go to Spartivento to see what had happened there. I fear my men are ill. The night

was lovely, perfectly calm; so we lay close to the boat and signals were continually sent, but with no result.

This morning I laid the cable down to Fort Genois in style; and now we are picking up odds and ends of cable

between the different breaks, and getting our buoys on board, Tomorrow I expect to leave for Spartivento.'

And now I am quite at an end of journal keeping; diaries and diary letters being things of youth which

Fleeming had at length outgrown. But one or two more fragments from his correspondence may be taken, and

first this brief sketch of the laying of the Norderney cable; mainly interesting as showing under what defects

of strength and in what extremities of pain, this cheerful man must at times continue to go about his work.

'I slept on board 29th September having arranged everything to start by daybreak from where we lay in the

roads: but at daybreak a heavy mist hung over us so that nothing of land or water could be seen. At midday it

lifted suddenly and away we went with perfect weather, but could not find the buoys Forde left, that evening.

I saw the captain was not strong in navigation, and took matters next day much more into my own hands and

before nine o'clock found the buoys; (the weather had been so fine we had anchored in the open sea near

Texel). It took us till the evening to reach the buoys, get the cable on board, test the first half, speak to

Lowestoft, make the splice, and start. H had not finished his work at Norderney, so I was alone on board for

Reuter. Moreover the buoys to guide us in our course were not placed, and the captain had very vague ideas

about keeping his course; so I had to do a good deal, and only lay down as I was for two hours in the night. I

managed to run the course perfectly. Everything went well, and we found Norderney just where we wanted it

next afternoon, and if the shore end had been laid, could have finished there and then, October 1st. But when

we got to Norderney, we found the CAROLINE with shore end lying apparently aground, and could not

understand her signals; so we had to anchor suddenly and I went off in a small boat with the captain to the

CAROLINE. It was cold by this time, and my arm was rather stiff and I was tired; I hauled myself up on

board the CAROLINE by a rope and found H and two men on board. All the rest were trying to get the

shore end on shore, but had failed and apparently had stuck on shore, and the waves were getting up. We had

anchored in the right place and next morning we hoped the shore end would be laid, so we had only to go

back. It was of course still colder and quite night. I went to bed and hoped to sleep, but, alas, the rheumatism

got into the joints and caused me terrible pain so that I could not sleep. I bore it as long as I could in order to

disturb no one, for all were tired; but at last I could bear it no longer and managed to wake the steward and

got a mustard poultice which took the pain from the shoulder; but then the elbow got very bad, and I had to

call the second steward and get a second poultice, and then it was daylight, and I felt very ill and feverish.

The sea was now rather rough too rough rather for small boats, but luckily a sort of thing called a scoot

came out, and we got on board her with some trouble, and got on shore after a good tossing about which

made us all seasick. The cable sent from the CAROLINE was just 60 yards too short and did not reach the

shore, so although the CAROLINE did make the splice late that night, we could neither test nor speak. Reuter

was at Norderney, and I had to do the best I could, which was not much, and went to bed early; I thought I

should never sleep again, but in sheer desperation got up in the middle of the night and gulped a lot of raw

whiskey and slept at last. But not long. A Mr. F washed my face and hands and dressed me: and we hauled

the cable out of the sea, and got it joined to the telegraph station, and on October 3rd telegraphed to

Lowestoft first and then to London. Miss Clara Volkman, a niece of Mr. Reuter's, sent the first message to

Mrs. Reuter, who was waiting (Varley used Miss Clara's hand as a kind of key), and I sent one of the first

messages to Odden. I thought a message addressed to him would not frighten you, and that he would enjoy a

message through Papa's cable. I hope he did. They were all very merry, but I had been so lowered by pain

Of the 1869 cruise in the GREAT EASTERN, I give what I am able; only sorry it is no more, for the sake of

the ship itself, already almost a legend even to the generation that saw it launched.

'JUNE 17, 1869. Here are the names of our staff in whom I expect you to be interested, as future GREAT

EASTERN stories may be full of them: Theophilus Smith, a man of Latimer Clark's; Leslie C. Hill, my

prizeman at University College; Lord Sackville Cecil; King, one of the Thomsonian Kings; Laws, goes for

Willoughby Smith, who will also be on board; Varley, Clark, and Sir James Anderson make up the sum of all

you know anything of. A Captain Halpin commands the big ship. There are four smaller vessels. The WM.

CORY, which laid the Norderney cable, has already gone to St. Pierre to lay the shore ends. The HAWK and

CHILTERN have gone to Brest to lay shore ends. The HAWK and SCANDERIA go with us across the

'JUNE 18. SOMEWHERE IN LONDON. The shore end is laid, as you may have seen, and we are all under

'June 20. OFF USHANT. I am getting quite fond of the big ship. Yesterday morning in the quiet sunlight,

she turned so slowly and lazily in the great harbour at Portland, and bye and bye slipped out past the long pier

with so little stir, that I could hardly believe we were really off. No men drunk, no women crying, no singing

or swearing, no confusion or bustle on deck nobody apparently aware that they had anything to do. The

look of the thing was that the ship had been spoken to civilly and had kindly undertaken to do everything that

was necessary without any further interference. I have a nice cabin with plenty of room for my legs in my

berth and have slept two nights like a top. Then we have the ladies' cabin set apart as an engineer's office, and

I think this decidedly the nicest place in the ship: 35 ft. x 20 ft. broad four tables, three great mirrors, plenty

of air and no heat from the funnels which spoil the great diningroom. I saw a whole library of books on the

walls when here last, and this made me less anxious to provide light literature; but alas, today I find that

they are every one bibles or prayerbooks. Now one cannot read many hundred bibles. . . . As for the motion

of the ship it is not very much, but 'twill suffice. Thomson shook hands and wished me well. I DO like

Thomson. . . . Tell Austin that the GREAT EASTERN has six masts and four funnels. When I get back I will

make a little model of her for all the chicks and pay out cotton reels. . . . Here we are at 4.20 at Brest. We

'JULY 12. GREAT EASTERN. Here as I write we run our last course for the buoy at the St. Pierre shore

end. It blows and lightens, and our good ship rolls, and buoys are hard to find; but we must soon now finish

our work, and then this letter will start for home. . . . Yesterday we were mournfully groping our way through

the wet grey fog, not at all sure where we were, with one consort lost and the other faintly answering the roar

of our great whistle through the mist. As to the ship which was to meet us, and pioneer us up the deep

channel, we did not know if we should come within twenty miles of her; when suddenly up went the fog, out

came the sun, and there, straight ahead, was the WM. CORY, our pioneer, and a little dancing boat, the

GULNARE, sending signals of welcome with many coloured flags. Since then we have been steaming in a

grand procession; but now at 2 A.M. the fog has fallen, and the great roaring whistle calls up the distant

'JULY 13. All yesterday we lay in the damp dripping fog, with whistles all round and guns firing so that we

might not bump up against one another. This little delay has let us get our reports into tolerable order. We are

now at 7 o'clock getting the cable end again, with the main cable buoy close to us.'

A TELEGRAM OF JULY 20: 'I have received your four welcome letters. The Americans are charming

'PLYMOUTH, JUNE 21, 1873. I have been down to the seashore and smelt the salt sea and like it; and I

have seen the HOOPER pointing her great bow seaward, while light smoke rises from her funnels telling

that the fires are being lighted; and sorry as I am to be without you, something inside me answers to the call

'LALLA ROOKH. PLYMOUTH, JUNE 22. We have been a little cruise in the yacht over to the Eddystone

lighthouse, and my sealegs seem very well on. Strange how alike all these starts are first on shore,

steaming hot days with a smell of bonedust and tar and salt water; then the little puffing, panting

steamlaunch that bustles out across a port with green woody sides, little yachts sliding about, menofwar

trainingships, and then a great big black hulk of a thing with a mass of smaller vessels sticking to it like

parasites; and that is one's home being coaled. Then comes the Champagne lunch where everyone says all

that is polite to everyone else, and then the uncertainty when to start. So far as we know NOW, we are to start

tomorrow morning at daybreak; letters that come later are to be sent to Pernambuco by first mail. . . . My

'S. S. HOOPER. OFF FUNCHAL, JUNE 29. Here we are off Madeira at seven o'clock in the morning.

Thomson has been sounding with his special toy ever since halfpast three (1087 fathoms of water). I have

been watching the day break, and long jagged islands start into being out of the dull night. We are still some

miles from land; but the sea is calmer than Loch Eil often was, and the big HOOPER rests very contentedly

after a pleasant voyage and favourable breezes. I have not been able to do any real work except the testing [of

the cable], for though not seasick, I get a little giddy when I try to think on board. . . . The ducks have just

had their daily souse and are quacking and gabbling in a mighty way outside the door of the captain's deck

cabin where I write. The cocks are crowing, and newlaid eggs are said to be found in the coops. Four mild

oxen have been untethered and allowed to walk along the broad iron decks a whole drove of sheep seem

quite content while licking big lumps of bay salt. Two exceedingly impertinent goats lead the cook a perfect

life of misery. They steal round the galley and WILL nibble the carrots or turnips if his back is turned for one

minute; and then he throws something at them and misses them; and they scuttle off laughing impudently,

and flick one ear at him from a safe distance. This is the most impudent gesture I ever saw. Winking is

nothing to it. The ear normally hangs down behind; the goat turns sideways to her enemy by a little

knowing cock of the head flicks one ear over one eye, and squints from behind it for half a minute tosses

her head back, skips a pace or two further off, and repeats the manoeuvre. The cook is very fat and cannot run

'PERNAMBUCO, AUG. 1. We landed here yesterday, all well and cable sound, after a good passage. . . . I

am on familiar terms with cocoanuts, mangoes, and breadfruit trees, but I think I like the negresses best of

anything I have seen. In turbans and loose sea green robes, with beautiful blackbrown complexions and a

stately carriage, they really are a satisfaction to my eye. The weather has been windy and rainy; the HOOPER

has to lie about a mile from the town, in an open roadstead, with the whole swell of the Atlantic driving

straight on shore. The little steam launch gives all who go in her a good ducking, as she bobs about on the big

rollers; and my old gymnastic practice stands me in good stead on boarding and leaving her. We clamber

down a rope ladder hanging from the high stern, and then taking a rope in one hand, swing into the launch at

the moment when she can contrive to steam up under us bobbing about like an apple thrown into a tub all

the while. The President of the province and his suite tried to come off to a State luncheon on board on

Sunday; but the launch being rather heavily laden, behaved worse than usual, and some green seas stove in

the President's hat and made him wetter than he had probably ever been in his life; so after one or two rollers,

he turned back; and indeed he was wise to do so, for I don't see how he could have got on board. . . . Being

fully convinced that the world will not continue to go round unless I pay it personal attention, I must run

Edinburgh Colleagues FARRAGO VITAE I. The Family Circle Fleeming and his Sons Highland

Life The Cruise of the Steam Launch Summer in Styria Rustic Manners II. The Drama Private

Theatricals III. Sanitary Associations The Phonograph IV. Fleeming's Acquaintance with a Student

His late Maturity of Mind Religion and Morality His Love of Heroism Taste in Literature V. His

THE remaining external incidents of Fleeming's life, pleasures, honours, fresh interests, new friends, are not

such as will bear to be told at any length or in the temporal order. And it is now time to lay narration by, and

Edinburgh, which was thenceforth to be his home, is a metropolitan small town; where college professors and

the lawyers of the Parliament House give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational

advantages, make up much of the bulk of society. Not, therefore, an unlettered place, yet not pedantic,

Edinburgh will compare favourably with much larger cities. A hard and disputatious element has been

commented on by strangers: it would not touch Fleeming, who was himself regarded, even in this metropolis

of disputation, as a thorny tablemate. To golf unhappily he did not take, and golf is a cardinal virtue in the

city of the winds. Nor did he become an archer of the Queen's BodyGuard, which is the Chiltern Hundreds

of the distasted golfer. He did not even frequent the Evening Club, where his colleague Tait (in my day) was

so punctual and so genial. So that in some ways he stood outside of the lighter and kindlier life of his new

home. I should not like to say that he was generally popular; but there as elsewhere, those who knew him

well enough to love him, loved him well. And he, upon his side, liked a place where a dinner party was not of

The presence of his old classmate, Tait, was one of his early attractions to the chair; and now that Fleeming is

gone again, Tait still remains, ruling and really teaching his great classes. Sir Robert Christison was an old

friend of his mother's; Sir Alexander Grant, Kelland, and Sellar, were new acquaintances and highly valued;

and these too, all but the last, have been taken from their friends and labours. Death has been busy in the

Senatus. I will speak elsewhere of Fleeming's demeanour to his students; and it will be enough to add here

Edinburgh, then, with its society, its university work, its delightful scenery, and its skating in the winter, was

thenceforth his base of operations. But he shot meanwhile erratic in many directions: twice to America, as we

have seen, on telegraph voyages; continually to London on business; often to Paris; year after year to the

Highlands to shoot, to fish, to learn reels and Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in love with the

character of Highlanders; and once to Styria, to hunt chamois and dance with peasant maidens. All the while,

he was pursuing the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, taking up the phonograph, filled

with theories of graphic representation; reading, writing, publishing, founding sanitary associations,

interested in technical education, investigating the laws of metre, drawing, acting, directing private

theatricals, going a long way to see an actor a long way to see a picture; in the very bubble of the tideway

of contemporary interests. And all the while he was busied about his father and mother, his wife, and in

particular his sons; anxiously watching, anxiously guiding these, and plunging with his whole fund of

youthfulness into their sports and interests. And all the while he was himself maturing not in character or

body, for these remained young but in the stocked mind, in the tolerant knowledge of life and man, in pious

acceptance of the universe. Here is a farrago for a chapter: here is a world of interests and activities, human,

artistic, social, scientific, at each of which he sprang with impetuous pleasure, on each of which he

squandered energy, the arrow drawn to the head, the whole intensity of his spirit bent, for the moment, on the

momentary purpose. It was this that lent such unusual interest to his society, so that no friend of his can

forget that figure of Fleeming coming charged with some new discovery: it is this that makes his character so

difficult to represent. Our fathers, upon some difficult theme, would invoke the Muse; I can but appeal to the

imagination of the reader. When I dwell upon some one thing, he must bear in mind it was only one of a

score; that the unweariable brain was teeming at the very time with other thoughts; that the good heart had

In Edinburgh, for a considerable time, Fleeming's family, to three generations, was united: Mr. and Mrs.

Austin at Hailes, Captain and Mrs. Jenkin in the suburb of Merchiston, Fleeming himself in the city. It is not

every family that could risk with safety such close interdomestic dealings; but in this also Fleeming was

particularly favoured. Even the two extremes, Mr. Austin and the Captain, drew together. It is pleasant to find

that each of the old gentlemen set a high value on the good looks of the other, doubtless also on his own; and

a fine picture they made as they walked the green terrace at Hailes, conversing by the hour. What they talked

of is still a mystery to those who knew them; but Mr. Austin always declared that on these occasions he

learned much. To both of these families of elders, due service was paid of attention; to both, Fleeming's easy

circumstances had brought joy; and the eyes of all were on the grandchildren. In Fleeming's scheme of duties,

those of the family stood first; a man was first of all a child, nor did he cease to be so, but only took on added

obligations, when he became in turn a father. The care of his parents was always a first thought with him, and

their gratification his delight. And the care of his sons, as it was always a grave subject of study with him,

and an affair never neglected, so it brought him a thousand satisfactions. 'Hard work they are,' as he once

wrote, 'but what fit work!' And again: 'O, it's a cold house where a dog is the only representative of a child!'

Not that dogs were despised; we shall drop across the name of Jack, the harumscarum Irish terrier ere we

have done; his own dog Plato went up with him daily to his lectures, and still (like other friends) feels the loss

and looks visibly for the reappearance of his master; and Martin, the cat, Fleeming has himself immortalised,

to the delight of Mr. Swinburne, in the columns of the SPECTATOR. Indeed there was nothing in which men

take interest, in which he took not some; and yet always most in the strong human bonds, ancient as the race

He was even an anxious father; perhaps that is the part where optimism is hardest tested. He was eager for his

sons; eager for their health, whether of mind or body; eager for their education; in that, I should have thought,

too eager. But he kept a pleasant face upon all things, believed in play, loved it himself, shared boyishly in

theirs, and knew how to put a face of entertainment upon business and a spirit of education into

entertainment. If he was to test the progress of the three boys, this advertisement would appear in their little

manuscript paper: 'Notice: The Professor of Engineering in the University of Edinburgh intends at the close

of the scholastic year to hold examinations in the following subjects: (1) For boys in the fourth class of the

Academy Geometry and Algebra; (2) For boys at Mr. Henderson's school Dictation and Recitation; (3)

For boys taught exclusively by their mothers Arithmetic and Reading.' Prizes were given; but what prize

would be so conciliatory as this boyish little joke? It may read thin here; it would smack racily in the

playroom. Whenever his sons 'started a new fad' (as one of them writes to me) they 'had only to tell him about

it, and he was at once interested and keen to help.' He would discourage them in nothing unless it was

hopelessly too hard for them; only, if there was any principle of science involved, they must understand the

principle; and whatever was attempted, that was to be done thoroughly. If it was but play, if it was but a

puppetshow they were to build, he set them the example of being no sluggard in play. When Frewen, the

second son, embarked on the ambitious design to make an engine for a toy steamboat, Fleeming made him

begin with a proper drawing doubtless to the disgust of the young engineer; but once that foundation laid,

helped in the work with unflagging gusto, 'tinkering away,' for hours, and assisted at the final trial 'in the big

bath' with no less excitement than the boy. 'He would take any amount of trouble to help us,' writes my

correspondent. 'We never felt an affair was complete till we had called him to see, and he would come at any

time, in the middle of any work.' There was indeed one recognised playhour, immediately after the despatch

of the day's letters; and the boys were to be seen waiting on the stairs until the mail should be ready and the

fun could begin. But at no other time did this busy man suffer his work to interfere with that first duty to his

children; and there is a pleasant tale of the inventive Master Frewen, engaged at the time upon a toy crane,

bringing to the study where his father sat at work a half wound reel that formed some part of his design, and

observing, 'Papa, you might finiss windin' this for me; I am so very busy to day.'

I put together here a few brief extracts from Fleeming's letters, none very important in itself, but all together

'JAN. 15TH, 1875. Frewen contemplates suspending soap bubbles by silk threads for experimental

purposes. I don't think he will manage that. Bernard' [the youngest] 'volunteered to blow the bubbles with

'JAN. 17TH. I am learning a great deal of electrostatics in consequence of the perpetual crossexamination

to which I am subjected. I long for you on many grounds, but one is that I may not be obliged to deliver a

running lecture on abstract points of science, subject to cross examination by two acute students. Bernie

does not crossexamine much; but if anyone gets discomfited, he laughs a sort of little silverwhistle giggle,

'MAY 9TH. Frewen is deep in parachutes. I beg him not to drop from the top landing in one of his own

'JUNE 6TH, 1876. Frewen's crank axle is a failure just at present but he bears up.'

'JUNE 14TH. The boys enjoy their riding. It gets them whole funds of adventures. One of their caps falling

off is matter for delightful reminiscences; and when a horse breaks his step, the occurrence becomes a rear, a

shy, or a plunge as they talk it over. Austin, with quiet confidence, speaks of the greater pleasure in riding a

spirited horse, even if he does give a little trouble. It is the stolid brute that he dislikes. (N.B. You can still see

six inches between him and the saddle when his pony trots.) I listen and sympathise and throw out no hint

'JUNE 18TH. Bernard is much impressed by the fact that I can be useful to Frewen about the steamboat'

[which the latter irrepressible inventor was making]. 'He says quite with awe, "He would not have got on

'JUNE 27TH. I do not see what I could do without Austin. He talks so pleasantly and is so truly good all

'JUNE 27TH. My chief difficulty with Austin is to get him measured for a pair of trousers. Hitherto I have

failed, but I keep a stout heart and mean to succeed. Frewen the observer, in describing the paces of two

horses, says, "Polly takes twentyseven steps to get round the school. I couldn't count Sophy, but she takes

'FEB. 18TH, 1877. We all feel very lonely without you. Frewen had to come up and sit in my room for

company last night and I actually kissed him, a thing that has not occurred for years. Jack, poor fellow, bears

it as well as he can, and has taken the opportunity of having a fester on his foot, so he is lame and has it

'FEB. 19TH. As to Mill, Austin has not got the list yet. I think it will prejudice him very much against Mill

but that is not my affair. Education of that kind! . . . I would as soon cram my boys with food and boast of

But if Fleeming was an anxious father, he did not suffer his anxiety to prevent the boys from any manly or

even dangerous pursuit. Whatever it might occur to them to try, he would carefully show them how to do it,

explain the risks, and then either share the danger himself or, if that were not possible, stand aside and wait

the event with that unhappy courage of the lookeron. He was a good swimmer, and taught them to swim. He

thoroughly loved all manly exercises; and during their holidays, and principally in the Highlands, helped and

encouraged them to excel in as many as possible: to shoot, to fish, to walk, to pull an oar, to hand, reef and

steer, and to run a steam launch. In all of these, and in all parts of Highland life, he shared delightedly. He

was well onto forty when he took once more to shooting, he was fortythree when he killed his first salmon,

but no boy could have more singlemindedly rejoiced in these pursuits. His growing love for the Highland

character, perhaps also a sense of the difficulty of the task, led him to take up at fortyone the study of

Gaelic; in which he made some shadow of progress, but not much: the fastnesses of that elusive speech

retaining to the last their independence. At the house of his friend Mrs. Blackburn, who plays the part of a

Highland lady as to the manner born, he learned the delightful custom of kitchen dances, which became the

rule at his own house and brought him into yet nearer contact with his neighbours. And thus at fortytwo, he

began to learn the reel; a study, to which he brought his usual smiling earnestness; and the steps,

It was in 1879 that a new feature was added to the Highland life: a steam launch, called the PURGLE, the

Styrian corruption of Walpurga, after a friend to be hereafter mentioned. 'The steam launch goes,' Fleeming

wrote. 'I wish you had been present to describe two scenes of which she has been the occasion already: one

during which the population of Ullapool, to a baby, was harnessed to her hurrahing and the other in which

the same population sat with its legs over a little pier, watching Frewen and Bernie getting up steam for the

first time.' The PURGLE was got with educational intent; and it served its purpose so well, and the boys

knew their business so practically, that when the summer was at an end, Fleeming, Mrs. Jenkin, Frewen the

engineer, Bernard the stoker, and Kenneth Robertson a Highland seaman, set forth in her to make the passage

south. The first morning they got from Loch Broom into Gruinard bay, where they lunched upon an island;

but the wind blowing up in the afternoon, with sheets of rain, it was found impossible to beat to sea; and very

much in the situation of castaways upon an unknown coast, the party landed at the mouth of Gruinard river. A

shooting lodge was spied among the trees; there Fleeming went; and though the master, Mr. Murray, was

from home, though the two Jenkin boys were of course as black as colliers, and all the castaways so wetted

through that, as they stood in the passage, pools formed about their feet and ran before them into the house,

yet Mrs. Murray kindly entertained them for the night. On the morrow, however, visitors were to arrive; there

would be no room and, in so outoftheway a spot, most probably no food for the crew of the PURGLE;

and on the morrow about noon, with the bay white with spindrift and the wind so strong that one could

scarcely stand against it, they got up steam and skulked under the land as far as Sanda Bay. Here they crept

into a seaside cave, and cooked some food; but the weather now freshening to a gale, it was plain they must

moor the launch where she was, and find their way overland to some place of shelter. Even to get their

baggage from on board was no light business; for the dingy was blown so far to leeward every trip, that they

must carry her back by hand along the beach. But this once managed, and a cart procured in the

neighbourhood, they were able to spend the night in a pothouse on Ault Bea. Next day, the sea was

unapproachable; but the next they had a pleasant passage to Poolewe, hugging the cliffs, the falling swell

bursting close by them in the gullies, and the black scarts that sat like ornaments on the top of every stack and

pinnacle, looking down into the PURGLE as she passed. The climate of Scotland had not done with them yet:

for three days they lay stormstayed in Poolewe, and when they put to sea on the morning of the fourth, the

sailors prayed them for God's sake not to attempt the passage. Their setting out was indeed merely tentative;

but presently they had gone too far to return, and found themselves committed to double Rhu Reay with a

foul wind and a cross sea. From halfpast eleven in the morning until halfpast five at night, they were in

immediate and unceasing danger. Upon the least mishap, the PURGLE must either have been swamped by

the seas or bulged upon the cliffs of that rude headland. Fleeming and Robertson took turns baling and

steering; Mrs. Jenkin, so violent was the commotion of the boat, held on with both hands; Frewen, by

Robertson's direction, ran the engine, slacking and pressing her to meet the seas; and Bernard, only twelve

years old, deadly seasick, and continually thrown against the boiler, so that he was found next day to be

covered with burns, yet kept an even fire. It was a very thankful party that sat down that evening to meat in

the Hotel at Gairloch. And perhaps, although the thing was new in the family, no one was much surprised

when Fleeming said grace over that meal. Thenceforward he continued to observe the form, so that there was

kept alive in his house a grateful memory of peril and deliverance. But there was nothing of the muff in

Fleeming; he thought it a good thing to escape death, but a becoming and a healthful thing to run the risk of

it; and what is rarer, that which he thought for himself, he thought for his family also. In spite of the terrors of

Rhu Reay, the cruise was persevered in and brought to an end under happier conditions.

One year, instead of the Highlands, Alt Aussee, in the Steiermark, was chosen for the holidays; and the place,

the people, and the life delighted Fleeming. He worked hard at German, which he had much forgotten since

he was a boy; and what is highly characteristic, equally hard at the patois, in which he learned to excel. He

won a prize at a Schutzenfest; and though he hunted chamois without much success, brought down more

interesting game in the shape of the Styrian peasants, and in particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was

much of a character; and his appreciations of Fleeming have a fine note of their own. The bringing up of the

boys he deigned to approve of: 'FAST SO GUT WIE EIN BAUER,' was his trenchant criticism. The attention

and courtly respect with which Fleeming surrounded his wife, was something of a puzzle to the philosophic

gillie; he announced in the village that Mrs. Jenkin DIE SILBERNE FRAU, as the folk had prettily named

her from some silver ornaments was a 'GEBORENE GRAFIN' who had married beneath her; and when

Fleeming explained what he called the English theory (though indeed it was quite his own) of married

relations, Joseph, admiring but unconvinced, avowed it was 'GAR SCHON.' Joseph's cousin, Walpurga

Moser, to an orchestra of clarionet and zither, taught the family the country dances, the Steierisch and the

Landler, and gained their hearts during the lessons. Her sister Loys, too, who was up at the Alp with the

cattle, came down to church on Sundays, made acquaintance with the Jenkins, and must have them up to see

the sunrise from her house upon the Loser, where they had supper and all slept in the loft among the hay. The

Mosers were not lost sight of; Walpurga still corresponds with Mrs. Jenkin, and it was a late pleasure of

Fleeming's to choose and despatch a wedding present for his little mountain friend. This visit was brought to

an end by a ball in the big inn parlour; the refreshments chosen, the list of guests drawn up, by Joseph; the

best music of the place in attendance; and hosts and guests in their best clothes. The ball was opened by Mrs.

Jenkin dancing Steierisch with a lordly Bauer, in gray and silver and with a plumed hat; and Fleeming

There ran a principle through all these holiday pleasures. In Styria as in the Highlands, the same course was

followed: Fleeming threw himself as fully as he could into the life and occupations of the native people,

studying everywhere their dances and their language, and conforming, always with pleasure, to their rustic

etiquette. Just as the ball at Alt Aussee was designed for the taste of Joseph, the parting feast at Attadale was

ordered in every particular to the taste of Murdoch the Keeper. Fleeming was not one of the common,

socalled gentlemen, who take the tricks of their own coterie to be eternal principles of taste. He was aware,

on the other hand, that rustic people dwelling in their own places, follow ancient rules with fastidious

precision, and are easily shocked and embarrassed by what (if they used the word) they would have to call the

vulgarity of visitors from town. And he, who was so cavalier with men of his own class, was sedulous to

shield the more tender feelings of the peasant; he, who could be so trying in a drawingroom, was even

punctilious in the cottage. It was in all respects a happy virtue. It renewed his life, during these holidays, in

all particulars. It often entertained him with the discovery of strange survivals; as when, by the orders of

Murdoch, Mrs. Jenkin must publicly taste of every dish before it was set before her guests. And thus to throw

himself into a fresh life and a new school of manners was a grateful exercise of Fleeming's mimetic instinct;

and to the pleasures of the open air, of hardships supported, of dexterities improved and displayed, and of

Fleeming was all his life a lover of the play and all that belonged to it. Dramatic literature he knew fully. He

was one of the not very numerous people who can read a play: a knack, the fruit of much knowledge and

some imagination, comparable to that of reading score. Few men better understood the artificial principles on

which a play is good or bad; few more unaffectedly enjoyed a piece of any merit of construction. His own

play was conceived with a double design; for he had long been filled with his theory of the true story of

Griselda; used to gird at Father Chaucer for his misconception; and was, perhaps first of all, moved by the

desire to do justice to the Marquis of Saluces, and perhaps only in the second place, by the wish to treat a

story (as he phrased it) like a sum in arithmetic. I do not think he quite succeeded; but I must own myself no

fit judge. Fleeming and I were teacher and taught as to the principles, disputatious rivals in the practice, of

Acting had always, ever since Rachel and the Marseillaise, a particular power on him. 'If I do not cry at the

play,' he used to say, 'I want to have my money back.' Even from a poor play with poor actors, he could draw

pleasure. 'Giacometti's ELISABETTA,' I find him writing, 'fetched the house vastly. Poor Queen Elizabeth!

And yet it was a little good.' And again, after a night of Salvini: 'I do not suppose any one with feelings could

sit out OTHELLO, if Iago and Desdemona were acted.' Salvini was, in his view, the greatest actor he had

seen. We were all indeed moved and bettered by the visit of that wonderful man. 'I declare I feel as if I

could pray!' cried one of us, on the return from HAMLET. 'That is prayer,' said Fleeming. W. B. Hole and

I, in a fine enthusiasm of gratitude, determined to draw up an address to Salvini, did so, and carried it to

Fleeming; and I shall never forget with what coldness he heard and deleted the eloquence of our draft, nor

with what spirit (our vanities once properly mortified) he threw himself into the business of collecting

signatures. It was his part, on the ground of his Italian, to see and arrange with the actor; it was mine to write

in the ACADEMY a notice of the first performance of MACBETH. Fleeming opened the paper, read so far,

and flung it on the floor. 'No,' he cried, 'that won't do. You were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini!' The

criticism was shrewd as usual, but it was unfair through ignorance; it was not of myself that I was thinking,

but of the difficulties of my trade which I had not well mastered. Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure which

Fleeming and I shared the year of the Paris Exposition, was the MARQUIS DE VILLEMER, that blameless

play, performed by Madeleine Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat an actress, in such parts at least, to

whom I have never seen full justice rendered. He had his fill of weeping on that occasion; and when the piece

was at an end, in front of a cafe, in the mild, midnight air, we had our fill of talk about the art of acting.

But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an inheritance from Norwich, from Edward

Barron, and from Enfield of the SPEAKER. The theatre was one of Edward Barron's elegant hobbies; he read

plays, as became Enfield's soninlaw, with a good discretion; he wrote plays for his family, in which Eliza

Barron used to shine in the chief parts; and later in life, after the Norwich home was broken up, his little

granddaughter would sit behind him in a great armchair, and be introduced, with his stately elocution, to the

world of dramatic literature. From this, in a direct line, we can deduce the charades at Claygate; and after

money came, in the Edinburgh days, that private theatre which took up so much of Fleeming's energy and

thought. The company Mr. and Mrs. R. O. Carter of Colwall, W. B. Hole, Captain Charles Douglas, Mr.

Kunz, Mr. Burnett, Professor Lewis Campbell, Mr. Charles Baxter, and many more made a charming

society for themselves and gave pleasure to their audience. Mr. Carter in Sir Toby Belch it would be hard to

beat. Mr. Hole in broad farce, or as the herald in the TRACHINIAE, showed true stage talent. As for Mrs.

Jenkin, it was for her the rest of us existed and were forgiven; her powers were an endless spring of pride and

pleasure to her husband; he spent hours hearing and schooling her in private; and when it came to the

performance, though there was perhaps no one in the audience more critical, none was more moved than

Fleeming. The rest of us did not aspire so high. There were always five performances and weeks of busy

rehearsal; and whether we came to sit and stifle as the prompter, to be the dumb (or rather the inarticulate)

recipients of Carter's dog whip in the TAMING OF THE SHREW, or having earned our spurs, to lose one

more illusion in a leading part, we were always sure at least of a long and an exciting holiday in mirthful

In this laborious annual diversion, Fleeming's part was large. I never thought him an actor, but he was

something of a mimic, which stood him in stead. Thus he had seen Got in Poirier; and his own Poirier, when

he came to play it, breathed meritoriously of the model. The last part I saw him play was Triplet, and at first I

thought it promised well. But alas! the boys went for a holiday, missed a train, and were not heard of at home

till late at night. Poor Fleeming, the man who never hesitated to give his sons a chisel or a gun, or to send

them abroad in a canoe or on a horse, toiled all day at his rehearsal, growing hourly paler, Triplet growing

hourly less meritorious. And though the return of the children, none the worse for their little adventure,

brought the colour back into his face, it could not restore him to his part. I remember finding him seated on

the stairs in some rare moment of quiet during the subsequent performances. 'Hullo, Jenkin,' said I, 'you look

down in the mouth.' 'My dear boy,' said he, 'haven't you heard me? I have not one decent intonation from

But indeed he never supposed himself an actor; took a part, when he took any, merely for convenience, as

one takes a hand at whist; and found his true service and pleasure in the more congenial business of the

manager. Augier, Racine, Shakespeare, Aristophanes in Hookham Frere's translation, Sophocles and

AEschylus in Lewis Campbell's, such were some of the authors whom he introduced to his public. In putting

these upon the stage, he found a thousand exercises for his ingenuity and taste, a thousand problems arising

which he delighted to study, a thousand opportunities to make these infinitesimal improvements which are so

much in art and for the artist. Our first Greek play had been costumed by the professional costumer, with

unforgetable results of comicality and indecorum: the second, the TRACHINIAE, of Sophocles, he took in

hand himself, and a delightful task he made of it. His study was then in antiquarian books, where he found

confusion, and on statues and basreliefs, where he at last found clearness; after an hour or so at the British

Museum, he was able to master 'the chiton, sleeves and all'; and before the time was ripe, he had a theory of

Greek tailoring at his fingers' ends, and had all the costumes made under his eye as a Greek tailor would have

made them. 'The Greeks made the best plays and the best statues, and were the best architects: of course, they

were the best tailors, too,' said he; and was never weary, when he could find a tolerant listener, of dwelling on

the simplicity, the economy, the elegance both of means and effect, which made their system so delightful.

But there is another side to the stagemanager's employment. The discipline of acting is detestable; the

failures and triumphs of that business appeal too directly to the vanity; and even in the course of a careful

amateur performance such as ours, much of the smaller side of man will be displayed. Fleeming, among

conflicting vanities and levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he might be wrong;

but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all

other things, an iron taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it at all, he would see

that it was done as well as you were able. I have known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife)

repeating the same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon. And yet he gained

and retained warm feelings from far the most of those who fell under his domination, and particularly (it is

pleasant to remember) from the girls. After the slipshod training and the incomplete accomplishments of a

girls' school, there was something at first annoying, at last exciting and bracing, in this high standard of

It did not matter why he entered upon any study or employment, whether for amusement like the Greek

tailoring or the Highland reels, whether from a desire to serve the public as with his sanitary work, or in the

view of benefiting poorer men as with his labours for technical education, he 'pitched into it' (as he would

have said himself) with the same headlong zest. I give in the Appendix a letter from Colonel Fergusson,

which tells fully the nature of the sanitary work and of Fleeming's part and success in it. It will be enough to

say here that it was a scheme of protection against the blundering of builders and the dishonesty of plumbers.

Started with an eye rather to the houses of the rich, Fleeming hoped his Sanitary Associations would soon

extend their sphere of usefulness and improve the dwellings of the poor. In this hope he was disappointed; but

in all other ways the scheme exceedingly prospered, associations sprang up and continue to spring up in

Here, then, was a serious employment; it has proved highly useful to mankind; and it was begun besides, in a

mood of bitterness, under the shock of what Fleeming would so sensitively feel the death of a whole family

of children. Yet it was gone upon like a holiday jaunt. I read in Colonel Fergusson's letter that his

schoolmates bantered him when he began to broach his scheme; so did I at first, and he took the banter as he

always did with enjoyment, until he suddenly posed me with the question: 'And now do you see any other

jokes to make? Well, then,' said he, 'that's all right. I wanted you to have your fun out first; now we can be

serious.' And then with a glowing heat of pleasure, he laid his plans before me, revelling in the details,

revelling in hope. It was as he wrote about the joy of electrical experiment. 'What shall I compare them to? A

new song? a Greek play?' Delight attended the exercise of all his powers; delight painted the future. Of

these ideal visions, some (as I have said) failed of their fruition. And the illusion was characteristic. Fleeming

believed we had only to make a virtue cheap and easy, and then all would practise it; that for an end

unquestionably good, men would not grudge a little trouble and a little money, though they might stumble at

laborious pains and generous sacrifices. He could not believe in any resolute badness. 'I cannot quite say,' he

wrote in his young manhood, 'that I think there is no sin or misery. This I can say: I do not remember one

single malicious act done to myself. In fact it is rather awkward when I have to say the Lord's Prayer. I have

nobody's trespasses to forgive.' And to the point, I remember one of our discussions. I said it was a dangerous

error not to admit there were bad people; he, that it was only a confession of blindness on our part, and that

we probably called others bad only so far as we were wrapped in ourselves and lacking in the transmigratory

forces of imagination. I undertook to describe to him three persons irredeemably bad and whom he should

admit to be so. In the first case, he denied my evidence: 'You cannot judge a man upon such testimony,' said

he. For the second, he owned it made him sick to hear the tale; but then there was no spark of malice, it was

mere weakness I had described, and he had never denied nor thought to set a limit to man's weakness. At my

third gentleman, he struck his colours. 'Yes,' said he, 'I'm afraid that is a bad man.' And then looking at me

shrewdly: 'I wonder if it isn't a very unfortunate thing for you to have met him.' I showed him radiantly how it

was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic

rainbows. 'Yes, yes,' said he; 'but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won't you be tempted to use

In the year 1878, he took a passionate fancy for the phonograph: it was a toy after his heart, a toy that touched

the skirts of life, art, and science, a toy prolific of problems and theories. Something fell to be done for a

University Cricket Ground Bazaar. 'And the thought struck him,' Mr. Ewing writes to me, 'to exhibit Edison's

phonograph, then the very newest scientific marvel. The instrument itself was not to be purchased I think

no specimen had then crossed the Atlantic but a copy of the TIMES with an account of it was at hand, and

by the help of this we made a phonograph which to our great joy talked, and talked, too, with the purest

American accent. It was so good that a second instrument was got ready forthwith. Both were shown at the

Bazaar: one by Mrs. Jenkin to people willing to pay half a crown for a private view and the privilege of

hearing their own voices, while Jenkin, perfervid as usual, gave halfhourly lectures on the other in an

adjoining room I, as his lieutenant, taking turns. The thing was in its way a little triumph. A few of the

visitors were deaf, and hugged the belief that they were the victims of a new kind of fancyfair swindle. Of

the others, many who came to scoff remained to take raffle tickets; and one of the phonographs was finally

disposed of in this way, falling, by a happy freak of the ballotbox, into the hands of Sir William Thomson.'

The other remained in Fleeming's hands, and was a source of infinite occupation. Once it was sent to London,

'to bring back on the tinfoil the tones of a lady distinguished for clear vocalisations; at another time Sir

Robert Christison was brought in to contribute his powerful bass'; and there scarcely came a visitor about the

house, but he was made the subject of experiment. The visitors, I am afraid, took their parts lightly: Mr. Hole

and I, with unscientific laughter, commemorating various shades of Scotch accent, or proposing to 'teach the

poor dumb animal to swear.' But Fleeming and Mr. Ewing, when we butterflies were gone, were laboriously

ardent. Many thoughts that occupied the later years of my friend were caught from the small utterance of that

toy. Thence came his inquiries into the roots of articulate language and the foundations of literary art; his

papers on vowel sounds, his papers in the SATURDAY REVIEW upon the laws of verse, and many a strange

approximation, many a just note, thrown out in talk and now forgotten. I pass over dozens of his interests,

and dwell on this trifling matter of the phonograph, because it seems to me that it depicts the man. So, for

Fleeming, one thing joined into another, the greater with the less. He cared not where it was he scratched the

surface of the ultimate mystery in the child's toy, in the great tragedy, in the laws of the tempest, or in the

properties of energy or mass certain that whatever he touched, it was a part of life and however he

touched it, there would flow for his happy constitution interest and delight. 'All fables have their morals,' says

Thoreau, 'but the innocent enjoy the story.' There is a truth represented for the imagination in these lines of a

noble poem, where we are told, that in our highest hours of visionary clearness, we can but

'see the children sport upon the shore And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'

To this clearness Fleeming had attained; and although he heard the voice of the eternal seas and weighed its

message, he was yet able, until the end of his life, to sport upon these shores of death and mystery with the

It was as a student that I first knew Fleeming, as one of that modest number of young men who sat under his

ministrations in a soulchilling classroom at the top of the University buildings. His presence was against

him as a professor: no one, least of all students, would have been moved to respect him at first sight: rather

short in stature, markedly plain, boyishly young in manner, cocking his head like a terrier with every mark of

the most engaging vivacity and readiness to be pleased, full of words, full of paradox, a stranger could

scarcely fail to look at him twice, a man thrown with him in a train could scarcely fail to be engaged by him

in talk, but a student would never regard him as academical. Yet he had that fibre in him that order always

existed in his classroom. I do not remember that he ever addressed me in language; at the least sign of

unrest, his eye would fall on me and I was quelled. Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I

have misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than Fleeming Jenkin's. He was simply a

man from whose reproof one shrank; in manner the least buckrammed of mankind, he had, in serious

moments, an extreme dignity of goodness. So it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate of

students, but a power of which I was myself unconscious. I was inclined to regard any professor as a joke,

and Fleeming as a particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast pleasantry of my curriculum. I was

not able to follow his lectures; I somehow dared not misconduct myself, as was my customary solace; and I

refrained from attending. This brought me at the end of the session into a relation with my contemned

professor that completely opened my eyes. During the year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain

leaning to my society; I had been to his house, he had asked me to take a humble part in his theatricals; I was

a master in the art of extracting a certificate even at the cannon's mouth; and I was under no apprehension.

But when I approached Fleeming, I found myself in another world; he would have naught of me. 'It is quite

useless for YOU to come to me, Mr. Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases, there is no doubt about yours.

You have simply NOT attended my class.' The document was necessary to me for family considerations; and

presently I stooped to such pleadings and rose to such adjurations, as made my ears burn to remember. He

was quite unmoved; he had no pity for me. 'You are no fool,' said he, 'and you chose your course.' I showed

him that he had misconceived his duty, that certificates were things of form, attendance a matter of taste. Two

things, he replied, had been required for graduation, a certain competency proved in the final trials and a

certain period of genuine training proved by certificate; if he did as I desired, not less than if he gave me hints

for an examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree. 'You see, Mr. Stevenson, these are the laws and I am

here to apply them,' said he. I could not say but that this view was tenable, though it was new to me; I

changed my attack: it was only for my father's eye that I required his signature, it need never go to the

Senatus, I had already certificates enough to justify my year's attendance. 'Bring them to me; I cannot take

your word for that,' said he. 'Then I will consider.' The next day I came charged with my certificates, a

humble assortment. And when he had satisfied himself, 'Remember,' said he, 'that I can promise nothing, but

I will try to find a form of words.' He did find one, and I am still ashamed when I think of his shame in giving

me that paper. He made no reproach in speech, but his manner was the more eloquent; it told me plainly what

a dirty business we were on; and I went from his presence, with my certificate indeed in my possession, but

with no answerable sense of triumph. That was the bitter beginning of my love for Fleeming; I never thought

Once, and once only, after our friendship was truly founded, did we come to a considerable difference. It was,

by the rules of poor humanity, my fault and his. I had been led to dabble in society journalism; and this

coming to his ears, he felt it like a disgrace upon himself. So far he was exactly in the right; but he was scarce

happily inspired when he broached the subject at his own table and before guests who were strangers to me. It

was the sort of error he was always ready to repent, but always certain to repeat; and on this occasion he

spoke so freely that I soon made an excuse and left the house with the firm purpose of returning no more.

About a month later, I met him at dinner at a common friend's. 'Now,' said he, on the stairs, 'I engage you

like a lady to dance for the end of the evening. You have no right to quarrel with me and not give me a

chance.' I have often said and thought that Fleeming had no tact; he belied the opinion then. I remember

perfectly how, so soon as we could get together, he began his attack: 'You may have grounds of quarrel with

me; you have none against Mrs. Jenkin; and before I say another word, I want you to promise you will come

to HER house as usual.' An interview thus begun could have but one ending: if the quarrel were the fault of

When our intimacy first began, coldly enough, accidentally enough on his part, he had still something of the

Puritan, something of the inhuman narrowness of the good youth. It fell from him slowly, year by year, as he

continued to ripen, and grow milder, and understand more generously the mingled characters of men. In the

early days he once read me a bitter lecture; and I remember leaving his house in a fine spring afternoon, with

the physical darkness of despair upon my eyesight. Long after he made me a formal retractation of the

sermon and a formal apology for the pain he had inflicted; adding drolly, but truly, 'You see, at that time I

was so much younger than you!' And yet even in those days there was much to learn from him; and above all

his fine spirit of piety, bravely and trustfully accepting life, and his singular delight in the heroic.

His piety was, indeed, a thing of chief importance. His views (as they are called) upon religious matters

varied much; and he could never be induced to think them more or less than views. 'All dogma is to me mere

form,' he wrote; 'dogmas are mere blind struggles to express the inexpressible. I cannot conceive that any

single proposition whatever in religion is true in the scientific sense; and yet all the while I think the religious

view of the world is the most true view. Try to separate from the mass of their statements that which is

common to Socrates, Isaiah, David, St. Bernard, the Jansenists, Luther, Mahomet, Bunyan yes, and George

Eliot: of course you do not believe that this something could be written down in a set of propositions like

Euclid, neither will you deny that there is something common and this something very valuable. . . . I shall be

sorry if the boys ever give a moment's thought to the question of what community they belong to I hope

they will belong to the great community.' I should observe that as time went on his conformity to the church

in which he was born grew more complete, and his views drew nearer the conventional. 'The longer I live, my

dear Louis,' he wrote but a few months before his death, 'the more convinced I become of a direct care by

God which is reasonably impossible but there it is.' And in his last year he took the communion.

But at the time when I fell under his influence, he stood more aloof; and this made him the more impressive

to a youthful atheist. He had a keen sense of language and its imperial influence on men; language contained

all the great and sound metaphysics, he was wont to say; and a word once made and generally understood, he

thought a real victory of man and reason. But he never dreamed it could be accurate, knowing that words

stand symbol for the indefinable. I came to him once with a problem which had puzzled me out of measure:

what is a cause? why out of so many innumerable millions of conditions, all necessary, should one be singled

out and ticketed 'the cause'? 'You do not understand,' said he. 'A cause is the answer to a question: it

designates that condition which I happen to know and you happen not to know.' It was thus, with partial

exception of the mathematical, that he thought of all means of reasoning: they were in his eyes but means of

communication, so to be understood, so to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The mathematical he

made, I say, exception of: number and measure he believed in to the extent of their significance, but that

significance, he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity. Science was true,

because it told us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying

honestly faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the wise became a

Thus the atheistic youth was met at every turn by a scepticism more complete than his own, so that the very

weapons of the fight were changed in his grasp to swords of paper. Certainly the church is not right, he would

argue, but certainly not the antichurch either. Men are not such fools as to be wholly in the wrong, nor yet

are they so placed as to be ever wholly in the right. Somewhere, in mid air between the disputants, like

hovering Victory in some design of a Greek battle, the truth hangs undiscerned. And in the meanwhile what

matter these uncertainties? Right is very obvious; a great consent of the best of mankind, a loud voice within

us (whether of God, or whether by inheritance, and in that case still from God), guide and command us in the

path of duty. He saw life very simple; he did not love refinements; he was a friend to much conformity in

unessentials. For (he would argue) it is in this life as it stands about us, that we are given our problem; the

manners of the day are the colours of our palette; they condition, they constrain us; and a man must be very

sure he is in the right, must (in a favourite phrase of his) be 'either very wise or very vain,' to break with any

general consent in ethics. I remember taking his advice upon some point of conduct. 'Now,' he said, 'how do

you suppose Christ would have advised you?' and when I had answered that he would not have counselled me

anything unkind or cowardly, 'No,' he said, with one of his shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, 'nor

anything amusing.' Later in life, he made less certain in the field of ethics. 'The old story of the knowledge of

good and evil is a very true one,' I find him writing; only (he goes on) 'the effect of the original dose is much

worn out, leaving Adam's descendants with the knowledge that there is such a thing but uncertain where.'

His growing sense of this ambiguity made him less swift to condemn, but no less stimulating in counsel. 'You

grant yourself certain freedoms. Very well,' he would say, 'I want to see you pay for them some other way.

You positively cannot do this: then there positively must be something else that you can do, and I want to see

you find that out and do it.' Fleeming would never suffer you to think that you were living, if there were not,

This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie down with the bestial goddesses,

Comfort and Respectability, the strings of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man's. He loved

the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly

virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of

the motivemonger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he

loved the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense

of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate the spirit of the

pickthank; being what we are, he wished us to see others with a generous eye of admiration, not with the

smallness of the seeker after faults. If there shone anywhere a virtue, no matter how incongruously set, it was

upon the virtue we must fix our eyes. I remember having found much entertainment in Voltaire's SAUL, and

telling him what seemed to me the drollest touches. He heard me out, as usual when displeased, and then

opened fire on me with redhot shot. To belittle a noble story was easy; it was not literature, it was not art, it

was not morality; there was no sustenance in such a form of jesting, there was (in his favourite phrase) 'no

nitrogenous food' in such literature. And then he proceeded to show what a fine fellow David was; and what a

hard knot he was in about Bathsheba, so that (the initial wrong committed) honour might well hesitate in the

choice of conduct; and what owls those people were who marvelled because an Eastern tyrant had killed

Uriah, instead of marvelling that he had not killed the prophet also. 'Now if Voltaire had helped me to feel

that,' said he, 'I could have seen some fun in it.' He loved the comedy which shows a hero human, and yet

It was this taste for what is fine in humankind, that ruled his choice in books. These should all strike a high

note, whether brave or tender, and smack of the open air. The noble and simple presentation of things noble

and simple, that was the 'nitrogenous food' of which he spoke so much, which he sought so eagerly, enjoyed

so royally. He wrote to an author, the first part of whose story he had seen with sympathy, hoping that it

might continue in the same vein. 'That this may be so,' he wrote, 'I long with the longing of David for the

water of Bethlehem. But no man need die for the water a poet can give, and all can drink it to the end of time,

and their thirst be quenched and the pool never dry and the thirst and the water are both blessed.' It was in

the Greeks particularly that he found this blessed water; he loved 'a fresh air' which he found 'about the Greek

things even in translations'; he loved their freedom from the mawkish and the rancid. The tale of David in the

Bible, the ODYSSEY, Sophocles, AEschylus, Shakespeare, Scott; old Dumas in his chivalrous note; Dickens

rather than Thackeray, and the TALE OF TWO CITIES out of Dickens: such were some of his preferences.

To Ariosto and Boccaccio he was always faithful; BURNT NJAL was a late favourite; and he found at least a

passing entertainment in the ARCADIA and the GRAND CYRUS. George Eliot he outgrew, finding her

latterly only sawdust in the mouth; but her influence, while it lasted, was great, and must have gone some

way to form his mind. He was easily set on edge, however, by didactic writing; and held that books should

teach no other lesson but what 'real life would teach, were it as vividly presented.' Again, it was the thing

made that took him, the drama in the book; to the book itself, to any merit of the making, he was long

strangely blind. He would prefer the AGAMEMNON in the prose of Mr. Buckley, ay, to Keats. But he was

his mother's son, learning to the last. He told me one day that literature was not a trade; that it was no craft;

that the professed author was merely an amateur with a doorplate. 'Very well,' said I, 'the first time you get a

proof, I will demonstrate that it is as much a trade as bricklaying, and that you do not know it.' By the very

next post, a proof came. I opened it with fear; for he was indeed, as the reader will see by these volumes, a

formidable amateur; always wrote brightly, because he always thought trenchantly; and sometimes wrote

brilliantly, as the worst of whistlers may sometimes stumble on a perfect intonation. But it was all for the best

in the interests of his education; and I was able, over that proof, to give him a quarter of an hour such as

Fleeming loved both to give and to receive. His subsequent training passed out of my hands into those of our

common friend, W. E. Henley. 'Henley and I,' he wrote, 'have fairly good times wigging one another for not

doing better. I wig him because he won't try to write a real play, and he wigs me because I can't try to write

English.' When I next saw him, he was full of his new acquisitions. 'And yet I have lost something too,' he

said regretfully. 'Up to now Scott seemed to me quite perfect, he was all I wanted. Since I have been learning

this confounded thing, I took up one of the novels, and a great deal of it is both careless and clumsy.'

He spoke four languages with freedom, not even English with any marked propriety. What he uttered was not

so much well said, as excellently acted: so we may hear every day the inexpressive language of a

poorlywritten drama assume character and colour in the hands of a good player. No man had more of the

VIS COMICA in private life; he played no character on the stage, as he could play himself among his friends.

It was one of his special charms; now when the voice is silent and the face still, it makes it impossible to do

justice to his power in conversation. He was a delightful companion to such as can bear bracing weather; not

to the very vain; not to the owlishly wise, who cannot have their dogmas canvassed; not to the painfully

refined, whose sentiments become articles of faith. The spirit in which he could write that he was 'much

revived by having an opportunity of abusing Whistler to a knot of his special admirers,' is a spirit apt to be

misconstrued. He was not a dogmatist, even about Whistler. 'The house is full of pretty things,' he wrote,

when on a visit; 'but Mrs. 's taste in pretty things has one very bad fault: it is not my taste.' And that was the

true attitude of his mind; but these eternal differences it was his joy to thresh out and wrangle over by the

hour. It was no wonder if he loved the Greeks; he was in many ways a Greek himself; he should have been a

sophist and met Socrates; he would have loved Socrates, and done battle with him staunchly and manfully

owned his defeat; and the dialogue, arranged by Plato, would have shown even in Plato's gallery. He seemed

in talk aggressive, petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain you would have said as a peacock, until you trod

on his toes, and then you saw that he was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of vanity. Soundly rang his

laugh at any jest against himself. He wished to be taken, as he took others, for what was good in him without

dissimulation of the evil, for what was wise in him without concealment of the childish. He hated a draped

virtue, and despised a wit on its own defence. And he drew (if I may so express myself) a human and

humorous portrait of himself with all his defects and qualities, as he thus enjoyed in talk the robust sports of

the intelligence; giving and taking manfully, always without pretence, always with paradox, always with

exuberant pleasure; speaking wisely of what he knew, foolishly of what he knew not; a teacher, a learner, but

still combative; picking holes in what was said even to the length of captiousness, yet aware of all that was

said rightly; jubilant in victory, delighted by defeat: a Greek sophist, a British schoolboy.

Among the legends of what was once a very pleasant spot, the old Savile Club, not then divorced from Savile

Row, there are many memories of Fleeming. He was not popular at first, being known simply as 'the man

who dines here and goes up to Scotland'; but he grew at last, I think, the most generally liked of all the

members. To those who truly knew and loved him, who had tasted the real sweetness of his nature,

Fleeming's porcupine ways had always been a matter of keen regret. They introduced him to their own

friends with fear; sometimes recalled the step with mortification. It was not possible to look on with patience

while a man so lovable thwarted love at every step. But the course of time and the ripening of his nature

brought a cure. It was at the Savile that he first remarked a change; it soon spread beyond the walls of the

club. Presently I find him writing: 'Will you kindly explain what has happened to me? All my life I have

talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It

appeared to me that I had various things to say, and I had no malevolent feelings, but nevertheless the result

was that expressed above. Well, lately some change has happened. If I talk to a person one day, they must

have me the next. Faces light up when they see me. "Ah, I say, come here," "come and dine with me." It's

the most preposterous thing I ever experienced. It is curiously pleasant. You have enjoyed it all your life, and

therefore cannot conceive how bewildering a burst of it is for the first time at fortynine.' And this late

sunshine of popularity still further softened him. He was a bit of a porcupine to the last, still shedding darts;

or rather he was to the end a bit of a schoolboy, and must still throw stones, but the essential toleration that

underlay his disputatiousness, and the kindness that made of him a tender sicknurse and a generous helper,

shone more conspicuously through. A new pleasure had come to him; and as with all sound natures, he was

I can best show Fleeming in this later stage by quoting from a vivid and interesting letter of M. Emile

Trelat's. Here, admirably expressed, is how he appeared to a friend of another nation, whom he encountered

only late in life. M. Trelat will pardon me if I correct, even before I quote him; but what the Frenchman

supposed to flow from some particular bitterness against France, was only Fleeming's usual address. Had M.

Trelat been Italian, Italy would have fared as ill; and yet Italy was Fleeming's favourite country.

Vous savez comment j'ai connu Fleeming Jenkin! C'etait en Mai 1878. Nous etions tous deux membres du

jury de l'Exposition Universelle. On n'avait rien fait qui vaille a la premiere seance de notre classe, qui avait

eu lieu le matin. Tout le monde avait parle et reparle pour ne rien dire. Cela durait depuis huit heures; il etait

midi. Je demandai la parole pour une motion d'ordre, et je proposai que la seance fut levee a la condition que

chaque membre francais, EMPORTAT a dejeuner un jure etranger. Jenkin applaudit. 'Je vous emimene

dejeuner,' lui criaije. 'Je veux bien.' . . . Nous partimes; en chemin nous vous rencontrions; il vous presente

Et, depuis ce temps, nous avons ete de vieux amis. Non seulement nous passions nos journees au jury, ou

nous etions toujours ensemble, coteacote. Mais nos habitudes s'etaient faites telles que, non contents de

dejeuner en face l'un de l'autre, je le ramenais diner presque tous les jours chez moi. Cela dura une quinzaine:

puis il fut rappele en Angleterre. Mais il revint, et nous fimes encore une bonne etape de vie intellectuelle,

morale et philosophique. Je crois qu'il me rendait deja tout ce que j'eprouvais de sympathie et d'estime, et que

Chose singuliere! nous nous etions attaches l'un a l'autre par les sousentendus bien plus que par la matiere

de nos conversations. A vrai dire, nous etions presque toujours en discussion; et il nous arrivait de nous rire

au nez l'un et l'autre pendant des heures, tant nous nous etonnions reciproquement de la diversite de nos

points de vue. Je le trouvais si Anglais, et il me trouvais si Francais! Il etait si franchement revolte de

certaines choses qu'il voyait chez nous, et je comprenais si mal certaines choses qui se passaient chez vous!

Rien de plus interessant que ces contacts qui etaient des contrastes, et que ces rencontres d'idees qui etaient

des choses; rien de si attachant que les echappees de coeur ou d'esprit auxquelles ces petits conflits donnaient

a tout moment cours. C'est dans ces conditions que, pendant son sejour a Paris en 1878, je conduisis un peu

partout mon nouvel ami. Nous all mes chez Madame Edmond Adam, ou il vit passer beaucoup d'hommes

politiques avec lesquels il causa. Mais c'est chez les ministres qu'il fut interesse. Le moment etait, d'ailleurs,

curieux en France. Je me rappelle que, lorsque je le presentai au Ministre du Commerce, il fit cette spirituelle

repartie: 'C'est la seconde fois que je viens en France sous la Republique. La premiere fois, c'etait en 1848,

elle s'etait coiffee de travers: je suis bien heureux de saluer aujourd'hui votre excellence, quand elle a mis son

chapeau droit.' Une fois je le menai voir couronner la Rosiere de Nanterre. Il y suivit les ceremonies civiles et

religieuses; il y assista au banquet donne par le Maire; il y vit notre de Lesseps, auquel il porta un toast. Le

soir, nous revinmes tard a Paris; il faisait chaud; nous etions un peu fatigues; nous entr mes dans un des rares

cafes encore ouverts. Il devint silencieux. 'N'etes vous pas content de votre journee?' lui disje. 'O, si!

mais je reflechis, et je me dis que vous etes un peuple gai tous ces braves gens etaient gais aujourd'hui.

C'est une vertu, la gaiete, et vous l'avez en France, cette vertu!' Il me disait cela melancoliquement; et c'etait

la premiere fois que je lui entendais faire une louange adressee a la France. . . . Mais il ne faut pas que vous

voyiez la une plainte de ma part. Je serais un ingrat si je me plaignais; car il me disait souvent: 'Quel bon

Francais vous faites!' Et il m'aimait a cause de cela, quoiqu'il sembl t n'ainier pas la France. C'etait la un trait

de son originalite. Il est vrai qu'il s'en tirait en disant que je ne ressemblai pas a mes compatriotes, ce a quoi il

ne connaissait rien! Tout cela etait fort curieux; car, moimeme, je l'aimais quoiqu'il en e t a mon pays!

En 1879 il amena son fils Austin a Paris. J'attirai celuici. Il dejeunait avec moi deux fois par semaine. Je lui

montrai ce qu'etait l'intimite francaise en le tutoyant paternellement. Cela reserra beaucoup nos liens

d'intimite avec Jenkin. . . . Je fis inviter mon ami au congres de l'ASSOCIATION FRANCAISE POUR

L'AVANCEMENT DES SCIENCES, qui se tenait a Rheims en 1880. Il y vint. J'eus le plaisir de lui donner la

parole dans la section du genie civil et militaire, que je presidais. II y fit une tres interessante communication,

qui me montrait une fois de plus l'originalite de ses vaes et la s rete de sa science. C'est a l'issue de ce

congres que je passai lui faire visite a Rochefort, ou je le trouvai installe en famille et ou je presentai pour la

premiere fois mes hommages a son eminente compagne. Je le vis la sous un jour nouveau et touchant pour

moi. Madame Jenkin, qu'il entourait si galamment, et ses deux jeunes fils donnaient encore plus de relief a sa

personne. J'emportai des quelques heures que je passai a cote de lui dans ce charmant paysage un souvenir

J'etais alle en Angleterre en 1882 sans pouvoir gagner Edimbourg. J'y retournai en 1883 avec la commission

d'assainissement de la ville de Paris, dont je faisais partie. Jenkin me rejoignit. Je le fis entendre par mes

collegues; car il etait fondateur d'une societe de salubrite. Il eut un grand succes parmi nous. Mais ce voyaye

me restera toujours en memoire parce que c'est la que se fixa defenitivement notre forte amitie. Il m'invita un

jour a diner a son club et au moment de me faire asseoir a cote de lui, il me retint et me dit: 'Je voudrais vous

demander de m'accorder quelque chose. C'est mon sentiment que nos relations ne peuvent pas se bien

continuer si vous ne me donnez pas la permission de vous tutoyer. Voulezvous que nous nous tutoyions?' Je

lui pris les mains et je lui dis qu'une pareille proposition venant d'un Anglais, et d'un Anglais de sa haute

distinction, c'etait une victoire, dont je serais fier toute ma vie. Et nous commencions a user de cette nouvelle

forme dans nos rapports. Vous savez avec quelle finesse il parlait le francais: comme il en connaissait tous les

tours, comme il jouait avec ses difficultes, et meme avec ses petites gamineries. Je crois qu'il a ete heureux de

pratiquer avec moi ce tutoiement, qui ne s'adapte pas a l'anglais, et qui est si francais. Je ne puis vous peindre

l'etendue et la variete de nos conversations de la soiree. Mais ce que je puis vous dire, c'est que, sous la

caresse du TU, nos idees se sont elevees. Nous avions toujours beaucoup ri ensemble; mais nous n'avions

jamais laisse des banalites s'introduire dans nos echanges de pensees. Ce soirla, notre horizon intellectual

s'est elargie, et nous y avons pousse des reconnaissances profondes et lointaines. Apres avoir vivement cause

a table, nous avons longuement cause au salon; et nous nous separions le soir a Trafalgar Square, apres avoir

longe les trotters, stationne aux coins des rues et deux fois rebrousse chemie en nous reconduisant l'un l'autre.

Il etait pres d'une heure du matin! Mais quelle belle passe d'argumentation, quels beaux echanges de

sentiments, quelles fortes confidences patriotiques nous avions fournies! J'ai compris ce soir la que Jenkin ne

detestait pas la France, et je lui serrai fort les mains en l'embrassant. Nous nous quittions aussi amis qu'on

puisse l'etre; et notre affection s'etait par lui etendue et comprise dans un TU francais.

Mr Jenkin's Illness Captain Jenkin The Golden Wedding Death of Uncle John Death of Mr. and Mrs.

Austin Illness and Death of the Captain Death of Mrs. Jenkin Effect on Fleeming Telpherage The

AND now I must resume my narrative for that melancholy business that concludes all human histories. In

January of the year 1875, while Fleeming's sky was still unclouded, he was reading Smiles. 'I read my

engineers' lives steadily,' he writes, 'but find biographies depressing. I suspect one reason to be that

misfortunes and trials can be graphically described, but happiness and the causes of happiness either cannot

be or are not. A grand new branch of literature opens to my view: a drama in which people begin in a poor

way and end, after getting gradually happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not the thing

at all. It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act to close on a new and triumphant happiness, which

has been steadily growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things get blacker and

blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle

followed by a little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new idea was not true to nature. I'm

sick of this oldfashioned notion of art. Hold a mirror up, indeed! Let's paint a picture of how things ought to

be and hold that up to nature, and perhaps the poor old woman may repent and mend her ways.' The 'grand

idea' might be possible in art; not even the ingenuity of nature could so round in the actual life of any man.

And yet it might almost seem to fancy that she had read the letter and taken the hint; for to Fleeming the

cruelties of fate were strangely blended with tenderness, and when death came, it came harshly to others, to

In the autumn of that same year 1875, Fleeming's father and mother were walking in the garden of their house

at Merchiston, when the latter fell to the ground. It was thought at the time to be a stumble; it was in all

likelihood a premonitory stroke of palsy. From that day, there fell upon her an abiding panic fear; that glib,

superficial part of us that speaks and reasons could allege no cause, science itself could find no mark of

danger, a son's solicitude was laid at rest; but the eyes of the body saw the approach of a blow, and the

consciousness of the body trembled at its coming. It came in a moment; the brilliant, spirited old lady leapt

from her bed, raving. For about six months, this stage of her disease continued with many painful and many

pathetic circumstances; her husband who tended her, her son who was unwearied in his visits, looked for no

change in her condition but the change that comes to all. 'Poor mother,' I find Fleeming writing, 'I cannot get

the tones of her voice out of my head. . . I may have to bear this pain for a long time; and so I am bearing it

and sparing myself whatever pain seems useless. Mercifully I do sleep, I am so weary that I must sleep.' And

again later: 'I could do very well, if my mind did not revert to my poor mother's state whenever I stop

attending to matters immediately before me.' And the next day: 'I can never feel a moment's pleasure without

having my mother's suffering recalled by the very feeling of happiness. A pretty, young face recalls hers by

contrast a careworn face recalls it by association. I tell you, for I can speak to no one else; but do not

In the summer of the next year, the frenzy left her; it left her stone deaf and almost entirely aphasic, but with

some remains of her old sense and courage. Stoutly she set to work with dictionaries, to recover her lost

tongues; and had already made notable progress, when a third stroke scattered her acquisitions. Thenceforth,

for nearly ten years, stroke followed upon stroke, each still further jumbling the threads of her intelligence,

but by degrees so gradual and with such partiality of loss and of survival, that her precise state was always

and to the end a matter of dispute. She still remembered her friends; she still loved to learn news of them

upon the slate; she still read and marked the list of the subscription library; she still took an interest in the

choice of a play for the theatricals, and could remember and find parallel passages; but alongside of these

surviving powers, were lapses as remarkable, she misbehaved like a child, and a servant had to sit with her at

table. To see her so sitting, speaking with the tones of a deaf mute not always to the purpose, and to

remember what she had been, was a moving appeal to all who knew her. Such was the pathos of these two

old people in their affliction, that even the reserve of cities was melted and the neighbours vied in sympathy

and kindness. Where so many were more than usually helpful, it is hard to draw distinctions; but I am

directed and I delight to mention in particular the good Dr. Joseph Bell, Mr. Thomas, and Mr. Archibald

Constable with both their wives, the Rev. Mr. Belcombe (of whose good heart and taste I do not hear for the

first time the news had come to me by way of the Infirmary), and their nextdoor neighbour, unwearied in

service, Miss Hannah Mayne. Nor should I omit to mention that John Ruffini continued to write to Mrs.

Jenkin till his own death, and the clever lady known to the world as Vernon Lee until the end: a touching, a

becoming attention to what was only the wreck and survival of their brilliant friend.

But he to whom this affliction brought the greatest change was the Captain himself. What was bitter in his

lot, he bore with unshaken courage; only once, in these ten years of trial, has Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin seen him

weep; for the rest of the time his wife his commanding officer, now become his trying child was served

not with patience alone, but with a lovely happiness of temper. He had belonged all his life to the ancient,

formal, speechmaking, complimentpresenting school of courtesy; the dictates of this code partook in his

eyes of the nature of a duty; and he must now be courteous for two. Partly from a happy illusion, partly in a

tender fraud, he kept his wife before the world as a still active partner. When he paid a call, he would have

her write 'with love' upon a card; or if that (at the moment) was too much, he would go armed with a bouquet

and present it in her name. He even wrote letters for her to copy and sign: an innocent substitution, which

may have caused surprise to Ruffini or to Vernon Lee, if they ever received, in the hand of Mrs. Jenkin the

very obvious reflections of her husband. He had always adored this wife whom he now tended and sought to

represent in correspondence: it was now, if not before, her turn to repay the compliment; mind enough was

left her to perceive his unwearied kindness; and as her moral qualities seemed to survive quite unimpaired, a

childish love and gratitude were his reward. She would interrupt a conversation to cross the room and kiss

him. If she grew excited (as she did too often) it was his habit to come behind her chair and pat her shoulder;

and then she would turn round, and clasp his hand in hers, and look from him to her visitor with a face of

pride and love; and it was at such moments only that the light of humanity revived in her eyes. It was hard for

any stranger, it was impossible for any that loved them, to behold these mute scenes, to recall the past, and

not to weep. But to the Captain, I think it was all happiness. After these so long years, he had found his wife

again; perhaps kinder than ever before; perhaps now on a more equal footing; certainly, to his eyes, still

beautiful. And the call made on his intelligence had not been made in vain. The merchants of Aux Cayes,

who had seen him tried in some 'counterrevolution' in 1845, wrote to the consul of his 'able and decided

measures,' 'his cool, steady judgment and discernment' with admiration; and of himself, as 'a credit and an

ornament to H. M. Naval Service.' It is plain he must have sunk in all his powers, during the years when he

was only a figure, and often a dumb figure, in his wife's drawingroom; but with this new term of service, he

brightened visibly. He showed tact and even invention in managing his wife, guiding or restraining her by the

touch, holding family worship so arranged that she could follow and take part in it. He took (to the world's

surprise) to reading voyages, biographies, Blair's SERMONS, even (for her letter's sake) a work of Vernon

Lee's, which proved, however, more than he was quite prepared for. He shone more, in his remarkable way,

in society; and twice he had a little holiday to Glenmorven, where, as may be fancied, he was the delight of

the Highlanders. One of his last pleasures was to arrange his dining room. Many and many a room (in their

wandering and thriftless existence) had he seen his wife furnish with exquisite taste, and perhaps with

'considerable luxury': now it was his turn to be the decorator. On the wall he had an engraving of Lord

Rodney's action, showing the PROTHEE, his father's ship, if the reader recollects; on either side of this on

brackets, his father's sword, and his father's telescope, a gift from Admiral Buckner, who had used it himself

during the engagement; higher yet, the head of his grandson's first stag, portraits of his son and his son's wife,

and a couple of old Windsor jugs from Mrs. Buckner's. But his simple trophy was not yet complete; a device

had to be worked and framed and hung below the engraving; and for this he applied to his daughterinlaw:

'I want you to work me something, Annie. An anchor at each side an anchor stands for an old sailor, you

know stands for hope, you know an anchor at each side, and in the middle THANKFUL.' It is not easy,

on any system of punctuation, to represent the Captain's speech. Yet I hope there may shine out of these facts,

even as there shone through his own troubled utterance, some of the charm of that delightful spirit.

In 1881, the time of the golden wedding came round for that sad and pretty household. It fell on a Good

Friday, and its celebration can scarcely be recalled without both smiles and tears. The drawingroom was

filled with presents and beautiful bouquets; these, to Fleeming and his family, the golden bride and

bridegroom displayed with unspeakable pride, she so painfully excited that the guests feared every moment to

see her stricken afresh, he guiding and moderating her with his customary tact and understanding, and doing

the honours of the day with more than his usual delight. Thence they were brought to the diningroom, where

the Captain's idea of a feast awaited them: tea and champagne, fruit and toast and childish little luxuries, set

forth pellmell and pressed at random on the guests. And here he must make a speech for himself and his

wife, praising their destiny, their marriage, their son, their daughterinlaw, their grandchildren, their

manifold causes of gratitude: surely the most innocent speech, the old, sharp contemner of his innocence now

watching him with eyes of admiration. Then it was time for the guests to depart; and they went away, bathed,

even to the youngest child, in tears of inseparable sorrow and gladness, and leaving the golden bride and

It was a great thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing

pathos of such scenes consumed him. In a life of tense intellectual effort, a certain smoothness of emotional

tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle at both ends. Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done;

he pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent visits; but here was one of those clearcut,

indubitable duties for which Fleeming lived, and he could not pardon even the suggestion of neglect.

And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously hovered above the family, it began at last to

strike and its blows fell thick and heavy. The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken at last from his Mexican

dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel; and nothing in this remarkable old gentleman's life, became him like the

leaving of it. His sterling, jovial acquiescence in man's destiny was a delight to Fleeming. 'My visit to

Stowting has been a very strange but not at all a painful one,' he wrote. 'In case you ever wish to make a

person die as he ought to die in a novel,' he said to me, 'I must tell you all about my old uncle.' He was to see

a nearer instance before long; for this family of Jenkin, if they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the art of

manly dying. Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had dropped out of hail of his nephew's way of life

and station in society, and was more like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept a lodge; yet

he led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in the mind of Fleeming that train of tender and grateful

thought, which was like a preparation for his own. Already I find him writing in the plural of 'these

impending deaths'; already I find him in quest of consolation. 'There is little pain in store for these wayfarers,'

On May 19, 1884, Mr. Austin was taken. He was seventyeight years of age, suffered sharply with all his old

firmness, and died happy in the knowledge that he had left his wife well cared for. This had always been a

bosom concern; for the Barrons were longlived and he believed that she would long survive him. But their

union had been so full and quiet that Mrs. Austin languished under the separation. In their last years, they

would sit all evening in their own drawingroom hand in hand: two old people who, for all their fundamental

differences, had yet grown together and become all the world in each other's eyes and hearts; and it was felt

to be a kind release, when eight months after, on January 14, 1885, Eliza Barron followed Alfred Austin. 'I

wish I could save you from all pain,' wrote Fleeming six days later to his sorrowing wife, 'I would if I could

In the end of the same month, Captain Jenkin caught cold and was confined to bed. He was so unchanged in

spirit that at first there seemed no ground of fear; but his great age began to tell, and presently it was plain he

had a summons. The charm of his sailor's cheerfulness and ancient courtesy, as he lay dying, is not to be

described. There he lay, singing his old sea songs; watching the poultry from the window with a child's

delight; scribbling on the slate little messages to his wife, who lay bedridden in another room; glad to have

Psalms read aloud to him, if they were of a pious strain checking, with an 'I don't think we need read that,

my dear,' any that were gloomy or bloody. Fleeming's wife coming to the house and asking one of the nurses

for news of Mrs. Jenkin, 'Madam, I do not know,' said the nurse; 'for I am really so carried away by the

Captain that I can think of nothing else.' One of the last messages scribbled to his wife and sent her with a

glass of the champagne that had been ordered for himself, ran, in his most finished vein of childish madrigal:

'The Captain bows to you, my love, across the table.' When the end was near and it was thought best that

Fleeming should no longer go home but sleep at Merchiston, he broke his news to the Captain with some

trepidation, knowing that it carried sentence of death. 'Charming, charming charming arrangement,' was the

Captain's only commentary. It was the proper thing for a dying man, of Captain Jenkin's school of manners,

to make some expression of his spiritual state; nor did he neglect the observance. With his usual abruptness,

'Fleeming,' said he, 'I suppose you and I feel about all this as two Christian gentlemen should.' A last pleasure

was secured for him. He had been waiting with painful interest for news of Gordon and Khartoum; and by

great good fortune, a false report reached him that the city was relieved, and the men of Sussex (his old

neighbours) had been the first to enter. He sat up in bed and gave three cheers for the Sussex regiment. The

subsequent correction, if it came in time, was prudently withheld from the dying man. An hour before

Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him no more than nine and forty hours. On

the day before her death, she received a letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester, knew the hand,

kissed the envelope, and laid it on her heart; so that she too died upon a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight,

on the eighth of February, she fell asleep: it is supposed in her seventyeighth year.

Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this family were taken away; but taken with

such features of opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a kind of

admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with

something mystic and filial. 'The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible,' he had written in the

beginning of his mother's illness: he thought so no more, when he had laid father and mother side by side at

Stowting. He had always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him, he seemed to be half in love

with death. 'Grief is no duty,' he wrote to Miss Bell; 'it was all too beautiful for grief,' he said to me; but the

emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his wife thought he would have broken his

heart when he must demolish the Captain's trophy in the diningroom, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely

These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his vitality; he was not only worn out with

sorrow, he was worn out by hope. The singular invention to which he gave the name of telpherage, had of late

consumed his time, overtaxed his strength and overheated his imagination. The words in which he first

mentioned his discovery to me 'I am simply Alnaschar' were not only descriptive of his state of mind,

they were in a sense prophetic; since whatever fortune may await his idea in the future, it was not his to see it

bring forth fruit. Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a world filled with

telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and family but all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure,

when the company was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at least, never knew that he

was a possible rich man until the grave had closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming

chafed among material and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and he, like his father and

his mother, may be said to have died upon a pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was telling. 'I

am becoming a fossil,' he had written five years before, as a kind of plea for a holiday visit to his beloved

Italy. 'Take care! If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys

will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection.' There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years

brought him no repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first; weariness, to which he

began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate

which had overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the changed life now made for his family, the

elders dead, the sons going from home upon their education, even their tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns)

leaving the house after twentytwo years of service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams of

Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he told me) on 'a real honeymoon tour.' He had not been alone with his

wife 'to speak of,' he added, since the birth of his children. But now he was to enjoy the society of her to

whom he wrote, in these last days, that she was his 'Heaven on earth.' Now he was to revisit Italy, and see all

the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the

irritations of his strenuous activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to restore his former lightness of

foot; and it was a renovated youth that was to set forth upon this reenacted honeymoon.

The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed to go well, no fear was entertained; and

his wife was reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind. It is

doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life; and he was still unconscious when he

passed away, June the twelfth, 1885, in the fiftythird year of his age. He passed; but something in his gallant

vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses. Not from one or two only, but from many, I

hear the same tale of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss and instinctively looks for his

reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image like things of yesterday. Others, the wellbeloved

too, die and are progressively forgotten; two years have passed since Fleeming was laid to rest beside his

father, his mother, and his Uncle John; and the thought and the look of our friend still haunt us.

IN the beginning of the year 1859 my former colleague (the first British University Professor of

Engineering), Lewis Gordon, at that time deeply engaged in the then new work of cable making and cable

laying, came to Glasgow to see apparatus for testing submarine cables and signalling through them, which I

had been preparing for practical use on the first Atlantic cable, and which had actually done service upon it,

during the six weeks of its successful working between Valencia and Newfoundland. As soon as he had seen

something of what I had in hand, he said to me, 'I would like to show this to a young man of remarkable

ability, at present engaged in our works at Birkenhead.' Fleeming Jenkin was accordingly telegraphed for, and

appeared next morning in Glasgow. He remained for a week, spending the whole day in my classroom and

laboratory, and thus pleasantly began our lifelong acquaintance. I was much struck, not only with his

brightness and ability, but with his resolution to understand everything spoken of, to see if possible

thoroughly through every difficult question, and (no if about this!) to slur over nothing. I soon found that

thoroughness of honesty was as strongly engrained in the scientific as in the moral side of his character.

In the first week of our acquaintance, the electric telegraph and, particularly, submarine cables, and the

methods, machines, and instruments for laying, testing, and using them, formed naturally the chief subject of

our conversations and discussions; as it was in fact the practical object of Jenkin's visit to me in Glasgow; but

not much of the week had passed before I found him remarkably interested in science generally, and full of

intelligent eagerness on many particular questions of dynamics and physics. When he returned from Glasgow

to Birkenhead a correspondence commenced between us, which was continued without intermission up to the

last days of his life. It commenced with a wellsustained fire of letters on each side about the physical

qualities of submarine cables, and the practical results attainable in the way of rapid signalling through them.

Jenkin used excellently the valuable opportunities for experiment allowed him by Newall, and his partner

Lewis Gordon, at their Birkenhead factory. Thus he began definite scientific investigation of the copper

resistance of the conductor, and the insulating resistance and specific inductive capacity of its guttapercha

coating, in the factory, in various stages of manufacture; and he was the very first to introduce systematically

into practice the grand system of absolute measurement founded in Germany by Gauss and Weber. The

immense value of this step, if only in respect to the electric telegraph, is amply appreciated by all who

remember or who have read something of the history of submarine telegraphy; but it can scarcely be known

Looking to the article 'Telegraph (Electric)' in the last volume of the old edition of the 'Encyclopaedia

Britannica,' which was published about the year 1861, we find on record that Jenkin's measurements in

absolute units of the specific resistance of pure guttapercha, and of the guttapercha with Chatterton's

compound constituting the insulation of the Red Sea cable of 1859, are given as the only results in the way of

absolute measurements of the electric resistance of an insulating material which had then been made. These

remarks are prefaced in the 'Encyclopaedia' article by the following statement: 'No telegraphic testing ought

in future to be accepted in any department of telegraphic business which has not this definite character;

although it is only within the last year that convenient instruments for working, in absolute measure, have

been introduced at all, and the whole system of absolute measure is still almost unknown to practical

A particular result of great importance in respect to testing is referred to as follows in the 'Encyclopaedia'

article: 'The importance of having results thus stated in absolute measure is illustrated by the circumstance,

that the writer has been able at once to compare them, in the manner stated in a preceding paragraph, with his

own previous deductions from the testings of the Atlantic cable during its manufacture in 1857, and with

Weber's measurements of the specific resistance of copper.' It has now become universally adapted first of

all in England; twentytwo years later by Germany, the country of its birth; and by France and Italy, and all

the other countries of Europe and America practically the whole scientific world at the Electrical

An important paper of thirty quarto pages published in the 'Transactions of the Royal Society' for June 19,

1862, under the title 'Experimental Researches on the Transmission of Electric Signals through submarine

cables, Part I. Laws of Transmission through various lengths of one cable, by Fleeming Jenkin, Esq.,

communicated by C. Wheatstone, Esq., F.R.S.,' contains an account of a large part of Jenkin's experimental

work in the Birkenhead factory during the years 1859 and 1860. This paper is called Part I. Part II. alas never

appeared, but something that it would have included we can see from the following ominous statement which

I find near the end of Part I.: 'From this value, the electrostatical capacity per unit of length and the specific

inductive capacity of the dielectric, could be determined. These points will, however, be more fully treated of

in the second part of this paper.' Jenkin had in fact made a determination at Birkenhead of the specific

inductive capacity of guttapercha, or of the guttapercha and Chatterton's compound constituting the

insulation of the cable, on which he experimented. This was the very first true measurement of the specific

inductive capacity of a dielectric which had been made after the discovery by Faraday of the existence of the

property, and his primitive measurement of it for the three substances, glass, shellac, and sulphur; and at the

time when Jenkin made his measurements the existence of specific inductive capacity was either unknown, or

The original determination of the microfarad, brought out under the auspices of the British Association

Committee on Electrical Standards, is due to experimental work by Jenkin, described in a paper, 'Experiments

on Capacity,' constituting No. IV. of the appendix to the Report presented by the Committee to the Dundee

Meeting of 1867. No other determination, so far as I know, of this important element of electric measurement

has hitherto been made; and it is no small thing to be proud of in respect to Jenkin's fame as a scientific and

The British Association unit of electrical resistance, on which was founded the first practical approximation

to absolute measurement on the system of Gauss and Weber, was largely due to Jenkin's zeal as one of the

originators, and persevering energy as a working member, of the first Electrical Standards Committee. The

experimental work of first making practical standards, founded on the absolute system, which led to the unit

now known as the British Association ohm, was chiefly performed by Clerk Maxwell and Jenkin. The

realisation of the great practical benefit which has resulted from the experimental and scientific work of the

Committee is certainly in a large measure due to Jenkin's zeal and perseverance as secretary, and as editor of

the volume of Collected Reports of the work of the Committee, which extended over eight years, from 1861

till 1869. The volume of Reports included Jenkin's Cantor Lectures of January, 1866, 'On Submarine

Telegraphy,' through which the practical applications of the scientific principles for which he had worked so

devotedly for eight years became part of general knowledge in the engineering profession.

Jenkin's scientific activity continued without abatement to the end. For the last two years of his life he was

much occupied with a new mode of electric locomotion, a very remarkable invention of his own, to which he

gave the name of 'Telpherage.' He persevered with endless ingenuity in carrying out the numerous and

difficult mechanical arrangements essential to the project, up to the very last days of his work in life. He had

completed almost every detail of the realisation of the system which was recently opened for practical

His book on 'Magnetism and Electricity,' published as one of Longman's elementary series in 1873, marked a

new departure in the exposition of electricity, as the first textbook containing a systematic application of the

quantitative methods inaugurated by the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards. In 1883 the

seventh edition was published, after there had already appeared two foreign editions, one in Italian and the

His papers on purely engineering subjects, though not numerous, are interesting and valuable. Amongst these

may be mentioned the article 'Bridges,' written by him for the ninth edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,'

and afterwards republished as a separate treatise in 1876; and a paper 'On the Practical Application of

Reciprocal Figures to the Calculation of Strains in Framework,' read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh,

and published in the 'Transactions' of that Society in 1869. But perhaps the most important of all is his paper

'On the Application of Graphic Methods to the Determination of the Efficiency of Machinery,' read before the

Royal Society of Edinburgh, and published in the 'Transactions,' vol. xxviii. (187678), for which he was

awarded the Keith Gold Medal. This paper was a continuation of the subject treated in 'Reulaux's

Mechanism,' and, recognising the value of that work, supplied the elements required to constitute from