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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER, 1887.

MRS. CRAIK.

"FRIEND after friend departs." It is one of the most painful circumstances of life when on the decline to see dropping upon the way from time to time another and another well-known figure. The young too lose their brethren and comrades now and then, but the effect is different. The slow disappearance one by one of contemporaries and companions, the tendency towards the grave which has set in drawing us with it, the growing solitude in which we move, make us realise better than anything else that our cycle of life is rounding to its close.

A month ago, or little more, the present writer sat on a lovely terrace shaded by great trees overlooking the beautiful, placid Derwentwater lake, which lay smiling as if it had never known a storm-talking with Mrs. Craik of a tragedy, the occurrence of a moment, which had desolated the house behind us. We spoke with tears and hushed voices of the story never to be dissociated from that peaceful scene. One young man arriving gaily on an unexpected visit: the other, the young host, receiving him with cordial welcome and pleasure; the sudden suggestion of an expedition on the water, to which the little inland storm gave all the greater zest.

And

then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, all over, and the lake under the mother's windows become the deathscene of her only son. It seems strange No. 338.-VOL. LVII.

that almost the next thing heard of her was the fatal news, that she, so tenderly sympathetic, so full of maternal instincts that every mother's grief seemed her own, had almost as suddenly entered the presence of her Maker, and left her own home desolate. But not by any violent way, thank heaven not in pain or horror, but tranquilly, sweetly, as became her life, without any lengthened preliminaries, in the manner she had desired, and as a kindred soul has sung:

"Life! we've been long together Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;

'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;

Then steal away, give little warning; Choose thine own time,

Say not Good-night, but in some brighter clime

Bid me Good-morning."

So was the gentle spirit of Dinah Craik liberated from mortal cares, as many like her have prayed to be.

This is no time or place to speak of her work, which will no doubt have a variety of criticisms and interpretations; but about herself there is no conflict of testimony, and it is of herself her friends are thinking-her friends who are endless in number throughout all the three kingdoms, and reckoned in crowds less known and further off, to whom she has been familiar as a household word. To recall a little the actual look and

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aspect of a woman so widely known, yet so little of a public personage, so indisposed to put her own personality forward, is all that a friend can do.

We were contemporaries in every sense of the word: the beginning of her work preceding mine a little, as her age did-so little as scarcely to tell at all. We were both young when we made acquaintance: she a slim tall maiden always surrounded by a band of other ambitious and admiring girls, of whom and of whose talents and accomplishments she had always tales to tell with an enthusiasm not excited

by any success of her own. And yet even at this early period her literary gifts had received much acknowledgment. The early part of her life (she was but twenty-three at the time of her first important publication, but her independent career had begun long before) had been full of trial and of that girlish and generous daring which makes a young, high-spirited woman the most dauntless creature in creation. I do not know the facts of the story, but only its tenor vaguely, which was that her mother being as she thought untenderly treated by a father -a man of brilliant attainmentswhose profession of extreme Evangelical religiousness was not carried out by his practice the young Dinah, in a blaze of love and indignation, carried that ailing and delicate mother away, and took in her rashness the charge of the whole family, two younger brothers, upon her own slender shoulders, working to sustain them in every way that presented itself, from stories for the fashion books to graver publications. She had gone through some years of this feverish work before her novel, The Ogilvies, introduced her to a wider medium and to higher possibilities. Her mother, broken in spirit and in health, had died, as well, I think, as the elder of the two brothers, before I knew her; but the story was told among her friends, and thrilled the hearer with sympathy and admiration. That first struggle was over, along with the dearest cause of it, before Dinah

Mulock was at all known to the world, or to most of those who have held her dear in her later life. If there are any memorials of it left, it would no doubt form a most attractive chapter among the many records of early struggles. The young heroic creature writing her pretty juvenile nonsense of love and lovers, in swift, unformed style, as fast as the pen could fly, to get bread for the boys and a little soup and wine for the invalid over whose deathbed she watched with impassioned love and care-what a tragic, tender picture, to be associated by ever so distant a link with inane magazines of the fashions and short-lived periodicals unknown to fame! No doubt she must have thought sometimes how far her own unthought of troubles exceeded those of her Edwins and Angelinas. But she was always loyal to love, and perhaps this reflection did not cross her mind. There was no longer any mother when I first knew her, but only the bevy of attendant maidens aforesaid, and a brother, gifted but not fortunate, in the background who appeared and disappeared, always much talked of, tenderly welcomed, giving her anxieties much grudged and objected to by her friends, but never by herself; and she was then a writer with a recognised position, and well able to maintain it.

Little parties, pleasant meetings, kind visits at intervals, form a succession of pretty scenes in my recollection of her at this period. Involved in household cares, and the coming and alas! going of little children, I had no leisure for the constant intercourse which youthful friendship demands; but she was always the centre of an attached group, to which her kind eyes, full of the glamour of affection, attributed the highest gifts and graces. They were all a little literary-artists, musicians, full of intellectual interests and aspirations, and taking a share in all the pleasant follies, as well as wisdoms of their day. Spiritualism had made its first invasion of England about that time, and some families of

the circle in which Miss Mulock lived were deeply involved in it. One heard

of little drawings which a friend had received of the home in heaven from one of her infants lately departed there, and how the poor little scribbling consoled the sorrowful mother; along with many other wondrous tales, such as have been repeated periodically since, but then were altogether novel; and these early undeveloped séances formed sometimes part of the evening entertainments in the region where then we all lived, in the north of London towards Camden Town-regions grown entirely unknown now as if they were in Timbuctoo. Miss Mulock had a little house in a little street, full of pretty things, as pretty things were understood before the days of Heilbronner and Liberty, with all her little court about her. She sang very sweetly, with great taste and feeling, a gift which she retained long; and wrote little poesies which used to appear in Chambers's Journal, one in each weekly part; and knew a great many "nice people," and fully enjoyed her modest youthful fame, which was the climax of so much labour and pain, and her peaceful days. I don't know who her publisher had been for her first books, but she was (as is not unusual) dissatisfied with the results; and when John Halifax was about to be finished, she came to my house, and met, at a small dinner-party convened for that purpose, my friend Henry Blackett, another of the contemporary band who has long ago passed away, along with his still more dear and charming wife. They made friends at once, and her great book was brought into the world under his care-the beginning of a business connection which, notwithstanding her subsequent alliance with a member of another firm, was maintained to a late period, a curious instance of her fidelity to every bond.

This great book, which finally established her reputation, and gave her her definite place in literature, had then been for some time in hand. I am permitted to quote the following pretty

account of various circumstances connected with its beginning from the notes of Mr. Clarence Dobell.

"In the summer of 1852 she one day drove over with me to see the quaint old town of Tewkesbury. Directly she saw the grand old abbey and the medieval houses of the High Street she decided that this should form the background of her story, and like a true artist fell to work making mental sketches on the spot. A sudden shower drove us into one of the old covered alleys opposite the house, I believe, of the then town clerk of Tewkesbury, and as we stood there a bright-looking but ragged boy also took refuge at the mouth of the alley, and from the town clerk's window a little girl gazed with looks of sympathy at the ragged boy opposite. Presently the door opened, and the girl appeared on the steps, and beckoned to the boy to take a piece of bread, exactly as the scene is described in the opening chapters of John Halifax. We had lunch at the Bell Inn, and explored the bowling. green, which also is minutely and accurately described, and the landlord's statement that the house had once been used by a tanner, and the smell of tan which filled the streets from a tanyard not far off, decided the trade which her hero was to follow.

"She made one or two subsequent visits to further identify her background, and the name of her hero was decided by the discovery of an old gravestone in the Abbey churchyard, on which was inscribed John Halifax." had already decided that the hero's Christian name must be John, but the surname had been hitherto doubtful."

She

Thirty-four years after, in the course of the present autumn, Mrs. Craik made another expedition in the same faithful company to a spot so associated with her fame, and once more lunched at the Bell, where the delighted landlady, on being informed who her visitor was, told with pride that in the summer "hundreds of visitors, especially Americans, came to Tewkesbury, not so much to see the town and abbey, as to identify the scenery of John Halifax." Better still however than this are the words in which she expresses to her companion and correspondent the pleasure this visit gave her.

"Our visit was truly happy," she says, "especially the bright day of Tewkesbury, where my heart was very full, little as I showed it. It wasn't the book: that I cared little about. It was the feeling of thirty

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