Early Memories

Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/earlymemoriesOOIodguoft Jo i^a./..^cJ-.o^.yi-^^<^ c/lA^^:A,>^ci cx^LUA^ 1 BOOKS BY HENRY CABOT LODGE POBUSHXO BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS EARLY MEMORIES. 8vo tut, $2.60 THE STORY OF THE REVOLUTION. lUus- traUd. 8vo net, S3.00 A FRONTIER TOWN. AND OTHER ESSAYS. 12mo net, $1.60 A FIGHTING FRIGATE. AND OTHER ES- SAYS AND ADDRESSES. 12mo . Mi, $1.60 EARLY MEMORIES EARLY MEMORIES BY HENRY CABOT LODGE 'Quo desiderio veteres renovamus amores Atque olim missas flemus amicitias." —Catullus, Carm. XCVI. NEW YORK c^y^ CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1^: 1913 <v COPTBIOBT. 1913, BT CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September. 1913 Co MY CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN I DEDICATE THESE MEMORIES OP MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH PREFACE To begin a book with an apology is never desirable. Where, however, one writes about one's self or ventures to record one's personal recollections, some slight explanation seems almost necessary. Yet for what is contained in these pages I can give no better warrant or excuse than a passage from a very great writer who, it is to be feared, is not so much read now as he ought to be, or as he once was: "The life of every man," says our friend HerrSauerteig, "the life even of the meanest man, it were good to remember, is a Poem; perfect in all manner of Aristotelean requisites; with beginning, middle and end; with perplexities and solutions; with its willstrength (Willenkraft) and warfare against Fate, its elegy and battle-singing, courage marred by crime, everywhere the two tragic elements of Pity and Fear; above all, with supernatural machinery enough, for was not the man born out of Nonentity; did he not die and miraculously vanishing return thither?" Nothing really is easier than to find words of excellent appear- ance to explain the compelling motives for writing one's memoirs or reminiscences or autobiography. Whatever we may say, however, whatever ingenious phrases we may employ, the main pur- pose is to write about one's self, and the efficient reasons may all be summed up in the simple sentence: "I do it because it gives me pleasure." In fact, to the well-regulated mind there is no pleasure equal to that of talking about one's self, and one's satis- faction is not diminished by the inexorable necessity of seeming to talk about other people. My preface is already too long, even by these few words, and I will therefore end it here, trusting blindly for what is to follow in the assertion of Leslie Stephen, that "no autobiography is dull." CONTENTS PAOB Preface vii CHAPTBB I. Heredity 3 II. Earliest Memories: 1850-1860 14 III. The "Olympians": 1850-1860 39 IV. Boyhood: 1860-1867 59 V. Boyhood—My Last School: 1860-1867 ... 81 VI. The War: 1860-1865 112 VII. Europe: 1866-1867 135 VIII. Harvard: 1867-1871 180 IX. Retrospect and Contrast 200 X. Europe Again: 1871-1872 225 XI. Starting in Life: 1873-1880 244 XII. Public Men and Men of Letters .... 276 Index 353 EARLY MEMORIES CHAPTER I HEREDITY Every one in giving an account of himself would like, I think, to begin with the words of the Due de Choiseul at the opening of his memoirs: " Je ne vous parlerai pas, Mon- sieur, de ma naissance. L'on m'a toujours dit que j'etais gentilhomme aussi ancien que qui que ce soit. J'ignore absolument ma genealogie qui est, comme celle de tout le monde, dans les livres qui traitent cette matiere." We may still say, with a gentleman and a scholar who lived many years before the Due de Choiseul: " Honestissimum enim est majorum vestigia sequi, si modo recto itinere praeces- serint," ^ but it must be admitted that times and manners have greatly changed since the minister of Louis XV wrote, with a fine disdain, in this fashion. The Uttle world where "everybody" could find his genealogy in "the books" has departed. The waves of democracy have submerged the old and narrow Hues within which the few sat apart, and definition of a man's birth and ancestry has become more necessary. Moreover, Darwin and Galton have lived and written, Mendel has been discovered and revived, and the modern biologists have supervened, so that a man's origin has become a recognized part of his biographer's task. Therefore, he who writes of himself must follow the practice of those who write the lives of people other than themselves. My father was John Ellerton Lodge, a merchant of Bos- 1 Plin. lib. V. Epist. VIII, Kukula ed., Leipzig. 3 4 EARLY MEMORIES ton, an owner of ships engaged in commerce with China. He was the son of Giles Lodge, who was bom in London in 1770, the son of Matthew Lodge, a merchant, and EHza- beth Ellerton. The Ellertons were an old family in the north of England, where a priory on the Swale and an abbey on the Derwent conomemorate the antiquity of the race and their devotion to the church, both foundations bearing the Ellerton name. The abbey was still in the pos- session of the family in 1866. At that time a cousin of my father had changed his name to John Lodge Ellerton in order to inherit the property, which, I think, was of shght pecuniary value, and, as he had no children, he asked my mother to let me take the name of Ellerton and remain in England, a proposition wisely declined without previ- ous consultation of the person most concerned, although I should have cheerfully ratified the decision. According to Burke's "Royal Descents," Matthew Lodge was descended from Francis Lodge, archdeacon of Killaloe at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I find in Dwyer's "History of the Diocese" that the name of the archdeacon was Thomas Lodge, that he was archdeacon from 1624 to 1638, and that he was a graduate of Oxford. There are four of the name in the Oxford lists of about that period, and it was not possible, with such research as I could give, to identify the archdeacon. I should have liked to connect him with Thomas Lodge the poet, but be- yond the fact that the arms of my ancestors are identical with those of the poet's father, a rich grocer and Lord Mayor of London in 1563, I could discover no evidence of relationship. My grandfather, Giles Lodge, who, as I have said, was born in London in 1770, was in the West Indies in 1791 on business for his brothers, who were mer- chants in London and Liverpool. He was caught at Santo Domingo in the rising of the blacks which occurred in HEREDITY 5 August of that year. Presence of mind and the fact that he spoke French fluently enabled him to escape the mas- sacre and take refuge on an American schooner which brought him to Boston. Coming to Massachusetts by the merest accident, he found a good business opening in Bos- ton, settled there, became a merchant and the correspond- ent of his brothers, and never returned to England; in fact, he never left America again. In 1800 he married Mary Langdon, the daughter of John Langdon, who had been a stationer, then a captain in the Continental army during the Revolution, and who finally held a place in the custom- house, to which he was appointed by Washington. John Langdon's cousin, Samuel Langdon, was the president of Harvard College at the time of the Revolution, and prayed for the troops drawn up on Cambridge Common on the evening of June 16, just before they set out for Bunker Hill. The Langdons were descended from John and Philip Langdon, who came to New England in the seventeenth century, sailors and ship-captains, and such their descend- ants continued to be for a hundred years. John Langdon's wife, the mother of Mrs. Giles Lodge, was Mary Walley, the daughter of Thomas Walley, a prosperous merchant of Boston, grandson on the mother's side of Thomas Brattle, one of a family eminent in Colonial times, and on the father's side grandson of John Walley, lieutenant-general of the Canadian expedition in 1690, and later a judge of the Supreme Court. My grandfather, Giles Lodge, died in 1852 in the eighty- third year of his age. I have been told that he knew me, and was pleased to like me, but of him personally I have, of course, no recollection whatever. His portrait shows that he was fair, and the face which looks out from the picture is handsome, gentle, and refined. The family tradition represents him as a gentleman of somewhat deter- 6 EARLY MEMORIES mined character, "whose word was law," and whose laws were promulgated in the most concise form and were sub- ject to no debate. My mother always spoke of him with great affection, and said that he was invariably most kind to her. Apart from his picture, the family tradition, and some business letters, I have nothing which throws any light upon him or his character except his cane and a few books, my father's small portion, I suppose, of the library, which was divided among many children. A cane would not seem to be a very illuminating witness, and yet this particu- lar stick has seemed to me full of meaning. I have never been able to use it; it is not long enough for me—thus showing that its owner was a short man.

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