'. . . I'll tell you to-morrow 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 been too long on this one subject, 
it is because it is yet before my eyes.


'Monday, 24.


'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 (head-master) 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 Municipals were. . . . .

'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 news.

'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 ex-King 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 wounded.  That Third 
Legion has behaved splendidly.

'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 to-day, 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 to-day 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.


'Feb. 25.


'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 ex-King.  
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 wished I had stopped there.

'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 to-day 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 Bugeaud, who fired on the 
people. . . . .

'I have been out all day again to-day, and precious tired I am.  
The Republican party seem the strongest, and are going about with 
red ribbons in their button-holes. . . . .

'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 to-morrow as we got a letter to-night.


(On Envelope.)


'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 people in 
the world.  I am so glad to have been here.'


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 the very morrow of the 
massacre.

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


France standing on the top of golden hours
And human nature seeming born again.


At once, by temper and belief, they were formed to find their 
element in such a decent and whiggish convulsion, spectacular in 
its course, moderate in its purpose.  For them,


Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.


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

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 
anxiety and suspicion as they marched by.'

'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 full-grown, 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 legitimate end.

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, and for which he cherished 
to the end a special kindness.

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 
loved but yet mistrusted.

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 sword-bearer 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 well-informed 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 he remains in all 
respects but information a great child.'

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 fine-looking 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 drawing-room 
window, 'watching the huge red flashes of the cannon' from the 
Brigato and La Specula forts, and hearkening, not without some 
awful pleasure, to the thunder of the cannonade.

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 
without disturbance, old La Marmora being a commander of a Roman 
sternness.

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 first-class 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 fellow-students '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 task-mistress.  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 
'heart-rending 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 drawing-room 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 drawing-room 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 ready-made opinions which he embraced with a 
son's and a disciple's loyalty.



CHAPTER III.  1851-1858.



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 - Fleeming and Sir W. Thomson.


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 place of one with 
wrappings of old newspaper.

From half-past 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 ill-driven, a joint ill-fitted, 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 own imperfection, but 
resolute to learn.

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 and sleight of hand that 
made them possible.

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 to-day.  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 myself so decidedly somebody, instead of 
nobody,' he wrote.

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 sometimes they gathered quietly about him as he amused 
them with his pencil.

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 men-servants 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 passages-at-arms, 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 
life-long 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 motto during life.

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 half-past 
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 half-built streets of two-storied 
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 groaning, a voluntary Atlas.

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 PARGO-LETTO"; 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 generous-hearted 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, clear-sighted, loving 
son sitting at her side in one of his rare hours of pleasure, half-
beguiled, half-amused, 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 
help-mate; 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) with a truth sticking in 
his head.

'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 one.  Do not fear that 
anything you love will vanish, he must love it too.'

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 golden-haired 
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 high-flown 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 from enlightened Norwich to barbarian 
London, I have no means of judging.