Thus we reduce to a minimum the unjustified irregularities, and leave an easy basis, if our reforming suggestions were accepted, for an almost, if not perfectly, uniform adherence to one common rule.

ALFRED ERLEBACH.

From The London Quarterly Review. THE CONFIDENCES OF A SOCIETY POET.1 Mr. Locker-Lampson quoted in the preface to the first edition of his "Lyra Elegantarium" the following sentence from a newspaper reviewer, which, though its reference was to Praed in the first place, seems to have even a closer application to himself:

His poetry is that of a man who belongs to society, who has a keen sympathy with

the lightsome tone and airy jesting of

fashion, but who nevertheless, amid all this froth of society, feels that there are depths in our nature which, even in the gaiety of drawing-rooms, cannot be forgotten. His is the poetry of bitter-sweet, of sentiment that breaks into humor, and of solemn thought, which, lest it should be too solemn, plunges into laughter; it is in an especial sense the verse of society.

As a writer of such verse, the author of these "Confidences" gained a foremost place by the publication of his little volume of "London Lyrics," in 1857. These posthumous memoirs confirm his title to be known also as a man of charming disposition and refined tastes, a genial host, a discriminating collector; in short, a student and lover of the exquisite in letters and life, on whose quiet leisure only the most narrow and crabbed utilitarian could find it in his heart to frown.

The volume of memoirs, to which he has chosen to give the title of "My Confidences," is dedicated to his descendants. It was written at different times during the last fifteen years of his life, and was in type on the day of his death,

1 My Confidences: An Autobiographical Sketch. By Frederick Locker-Lampson. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1896.

which took place on May 30, 1895. He was anxious that, as he says,

If any descendant of mine in days far distant should chance to inherit some portion of my fondness for family records, however simple, for ancestral anecdotes, however slender, he or she should find something to gratify their humor saved from the fire-grate or the paper-mill.

He cannot trust the care of these records to his immediate posterity, because though, as he quaintly puts it, he has an immense admiration for them, he does not know which is more trying, "their languid endurance of a family history, or their inaccurate repetition of it."

He was born at Greenwich Hospital, very appropriately, for his family had an hereditary connection with the navy. His grandfather, Captain John Locker, enjoyed the distinction for some time of having Nelson serving un

der him as second lieutenant. The re

spect which Lord Nelson throughout his career cherished for his old commander is honorable to them both.

My dear friend [Nelson wrote to him in 1799, shortly before his death], I well know your goodness of heart will make all allowance for my present situation. and that truly I have not the time or power to answer all the letters I receive at the moment. But you, my old friend, after twenty years' acquaintance, know that nothing can alter my attachment and I have been your gratitude to you. scholar. It is you who taught me how to board a Frenchman by your conduct when in the Experiment. It is you who always said, "Lay a Frenchman close and you will beat him," and my only merit in my profession is being a good scholar. Our friendship will never end but with my life.

A few months after this, Nelson attended the remains of his old friend to their last resting place in Addington Churchyard, and wrote to Lady Hamilton, under the depression of spirits to which he was subject:

I regret that I am not the person to be attended upon at this funeral, for although I have had my days of glory, yet I find this world so full of jealousies and

Captain Locker had been appointed governor of Greenwich Hospital. His son, John Locker, was civil commissioner of the hospital, where in 1821 Frederick Locker was born. From his son's description, one conceives him as a superior man, somewhat rigidly and obstinately aware of his superiority, and by no means of facile commerce in his domestic relations. In 1810, he returned from India with his hair in a pigtail, and though that interesting form of headdress had long ceased to be fashionable, he could not be prevailed upon to give it up, until his brother, "the wag of that generation of Lockers," came behind his chair one day at dinner and cut it off.

His mother was the daughter of the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, an estimable clergyman, and a distinguished philologist.

My mother [says Locker] was exceedingly handsome. Tall and slight, she had a remarkably graceful carriage, a natural dignity of manner and movement; and this description held good when she was more than sixty years old. She had an innocent, anxious face. She told me that she was very timid as a girl, and that, when first married to my father, she was afraid of him. She often suffered from nervous lassitude, which made general society, especially in the evening, painful to her. But independently of that, her thoughts and desires centred in home, with husband and children. She took the liveliest interest in many things, a simple womanly interest. She was swayed by her feelings and sentiments more than by any intellectual and logical conviction. She was not what is called a superior person. .. One of her peculiar attractions was her simple enjoyment of a joke against herself. My mother was as merry as a grig. She had a delightful laugh. As I have said, we were very proud but rather afraid of my father. No one liked a jest more than he did, but it was not the same thing. And I am afraid she spoilt us, for when he was angry she would often and often stand in the gap while we rallied behind her. She had as much of her children's confidence as parents can well have. How little that

...

ing heart and soul into our fun and amusements, and even sympathizing with our minor follies.

Such was the domestic atmosphere in which the future poet was cradled. He was very pretty and precocious, but an exceedingly delicate, boy; and remained all through life physically fragile and sensitive. The Bishop of Norwich, Dean Stanley's father, in an interesting letter published in this volume, describes the home in Greenwich Hospital, in one of the wings overlooking the river, with its moving panorama of shipping. The writer dwells on the choice collection of drawings and paintings in the dining and drawing rooms, and on the well-selected volumes which filled the oak shelves in the library, and even more on the admirable school connected with the

hospital, and superintended by Commissioner Lockhard, where "one thousand children under perfect discipline were educated and prepared for the sea."

It must, indeed, have been an ideal home for an imaginative child.

I have faint visitings of nostalgia [wrote Locker, sixty years later] when I think of my home there. . . . the squares and colonnades which were the playground of my boyhood, the terrace, the five-foot walk, and the abounding river. One of my earliest recollections were the men, mysterious in their enor mous boots, who, with a toothless rake, as the tide receded, cleared the mud from the shore immediately in front of our windows. Then, on wintry mornings, there were the river pilots and longshoremen, in their row boats at anchor, taking a fisherman's constitutional, "three steps and overboard," and with shrugged shoulders, promoting circulation by beating their arms across their chests. I remember the familiar sounds from the craft in midstream, and the cheer of the early collier men as they weighed anchor. Then the garden in the Hospital grounds, which contained a pavilion of pleasure in the shape of a very earwiggy summer house; and the laundry yard, from which caro luogo we became a nuisance to our neighbors. We lighted bonfires there; dug

caves; kept rabbits, fowls, pigeons and guinea pigs, called after the characters in Walter Scott's novels.

From this infant paradise, Frederick was transferred at seven years old to a preparatory school on Clapham Common, kept by a lady of the scarcely reassuring name of Griffin. A year was spent here, not very satisfactorily either to the child or his parents, and then he went to a private school in Hampshire. We are apt to think that Dickens's picture of the reliance on the suasion of the cane by the middle-class schoolmaster of his day is rather overdrawn; but Locker's reminiscences supply one out of many confirmations of the truth of the great humorist's observation:

Years afterwards, when I was about eighteen, he came to see my father at Greenwich, and I was amazed to think the person before me, old and gauche, and with a propitiatory grin, was that formidable savage who had once exercised so terrible a sway. We talked of past days, and, as he was rather jocose, I ventured to say that I still felt the tingling of the hazel switches. The miserable creature

pretended that he had no recollection of the circumstance. "It is strange, my dear young friend, but I have entirely forgotten it." "Perhaps you have forgotten it, sir, but then, as some one has said, you were at the other end of the switch."

Under the rule of the south-country Creakle, young Locker indulged in the usual pastimes of the boy animal; he stole Mrs. Barnett's jams and pickles, cut off and appropriated the buttons of his master's ecclesiastical gaiters, "made free with his lozenges, and ruined his fishing tackle." But, at the same time, the dreamy, pensive habit of mind, which he had inherited with his delicate health, asserted itself, and began to give a pervading color and tendency to his life. "The sense of tears in mortal things, and of the transitory nature of everything took, and has ever since kept, possession of me." There were other school experiences a year with the Vicar of Drearyboro', a simple, kindly old man; another at "a huge, unregenerate, bullying school"

at Dulwich; two years at another day school' at Blackheath; none of them very satisfactory.

It is remarkable [says the writer, looking back on these days] how systems have changed as regards the treatment of boys. Burney's was not a cheap school; while I was there I cost my father £100 a year-a large sum of money then-and yet we were ill looked after and poorly fed. There were no cubicles; some of us slept two in a bed. We had tea, or milk and water, and huge hunches of bread, spread with butter, for breakfast; for dinner, rice pudding and current dumpling ("stickjaw"), on alternate days, served on an unsavory pewter platter, and before our meat; then our beef or mutton, served on the same plate as the pudding, and washed down with inferior "swipes" in tin mugs; all this inaugurated by a lengthy Latin thanksgiving. The food was coarse in quality, and the washing arrangements, to make the best of them, unpleasant. The system of punishment was a mistaken one; not much caning, and less flogging; but it was often, "Locker, copy out the Ten Commandments ten times," or, for a neglected lesson or word forgotten, to write out, perhaps during the best part of a summer afternoon, that particular word a thousand times.

We are apt to forget how very much more comfortable life is for most people than it was fifty years ago-and not only has the standard of comfort been raised, but the means of cheerful and innocent recreation have been enormously multiplied and diffused. The clerk or shopman of to-day may have his grievances, but with his bicycle, his free library, his halfpenny paper, and his cricket or tennis, he has no reason to envy the lot of his precursors half a century ago.

Frederick Locker's school career was so far from being brilliant that, he tells us, his parents, in sheer despair, took him away at seventeen, and sent him to a colonial broker's office. Here he exhibited no particular talent for business, but a "marked turn for quizzing,” which was not so much to the purpose. He admits that at this time he was something of a would-be fine gentle. man, giving little heed to invoices and

warrants, and a good deal to the cut of his trousers. One is not surprised to learn that the elder Mr. Locker was advised to remove him. He held a temporary appointment at Somerset House for some time after this, and in 1842, became a junior clerk in Lord Haddington's office at the Admiralty. Here he seems to have found his niche, or rather, perhaps, to have outgrown that T idle and fantastic phase through which so many clever young men have to pass before they "find themselves" and their true place in life. He was many years at the Admiralty, and his record of the small triumphs and failures of his official career makes very interesting reading.

In 1849 he had an attack of nervous depression, which led indirectly to an important crisis in his life. He had to take leave of absence from his office and went to Paris, armed with various letters of introduction, among others one to Lady Charlotte Bruce, who was then living at 29 Rue de Varennes, one of the fine old mansions in the Faubourg St. Germain. This was his first meeting with his future wife. Her wit, one may presume, attracted him at first; but he soon came to recognize the beauty of a most lovable and lofty character, and he grew to regard her as his "beneficent angel." They cor responded when Lady Charlotte left for London, and right on till March of the following year, when she came back to town. During a walk in Hyde Park Mr. Locker proposed, in what manner he can best relate:

We had seated ourselves on a bench and neither spoke. I took her hand. "This is the prettiest hand in all the world," said I. "I happen to know of one that's quite as pretty," said she. Another silence. Perhaps I was incredulous, but when she put the other pretty hand into mine, I know that we were both very happy.

Mr. Locker's marriage extended the circle, already considerable, of his acquaintance among notable and interesting people. The queen had a great regard for Lady Charlotte Locker, as she had for her sister, Lady Augusta

Bruce, afterwards so well known and loved as Lady Augusta Stanley, and used to command the young couple to the select courts which she held in the earlier years of her widowhood-a coveted privilege. At the house of his mother-in-law, Elizabeth, Lady Elgin, a gifted and distinguished lady with a passion for cold air, of which Mr. Locker makes great fun in these reminiscences, he met several of the most eminent citizens of the Republic of Letters, Browning among others, who

used to come to the Rue de Lille to read Keats' poetry to Lady Elgin. "The good fellow never read his own." The sketch of Mrs. Browning is kindly and discriminating:

I never saw her in society, but at her own fireside she struck me as very pleasing and exceedingly sympathetic. Her physique was peculiar; curls like the pendant ears of a water-spaniel, and poor little hands-so thin that when she welcomed you she gave you something like the foot of a young bird: the Hand that made her great had not made her fair. But she had striking eyes, and we forgot any physical shortcomings - they were entirely lost sight of in what I may call her incomparable sweetness, I might almost say affectionateness; just as while we are reading it, we lose sight of the incompleteness of her poetry-its lack of artistic control. She vanquishes by her genius and her charm.

At the Deanery in Dean Stanley's time, adorned by the gracious presence of his sister-in-law, and also at Lord Houghton's, Mr. Locker met other leading lights, many of whom are chronicled here in their habit as they lived. He met at the house of the famous giver of breakfasts, Dante Rossetti, who distinguished himself by sitting after dinner with his face buried in his hands. Mr. Locker met him on other occasions and found him pleasant enough, but thought his poetry without charm, and could not reconcile himself to the "congregation of queer creatures,"-ravens, marmots, wombats, and it was even rumored a gorillawhich used to live in the garden behind the house in Cheyne Walk. Like