THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris ISAAC FOOT EETEOSPECTS RETKOSPECTS WILLIAM KNIGHT EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS FIRST SERIES LONDON SMITH, ELDEB, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1904 [All rights reserved] PBEEACE IN these Betrospects no attempt is made to trace the full career, or describe the varied work, of those whose names occur in them. Neither finished portraiture, nor detailed biography, is aimed at. Only a few praterita, regarding some notable English men and women of last century which would otherwise have been unrecorded are brought together, and set down in a sort of miscellany. It has been prepared for the sake of those who now care for, and others who may yet be interested in, the memory and the words of those included in it. The majority are and ' ' ' well-known persons ; Memoirs,' Lives,' Journals,' ' ' ' Letters,' or slighter Sketches of several of them the work of competent and accredited authors now exist. The thus is not retraversed ground occupied by me ; and the chief interest of the book will be found in Letters hitherto unpublished and unknown, which cast light on the character of their writers, in Anecdotes and Ee- miniscences, as well as fragments of unrecorded Conver- sations, along with the impressions made on those who heard and have preserved them. Those who are described, whose dicta are given, or whose letters and conversations are reported, were all vi RETROSPECTS personal acquaintances. In one or two cases our meet- occasional but with the ings were only ; majority my intercourse was frequent, sometimes continuous, and our correspondence extended over many consecutive years. I now regret that I did not, except in rare cases, write down at the time of hearing them the literary and social judgments, the criticism of men and things, and the casual sayings of these men (all now deceased), as I did in the Colloquia Peripatetica of John Duncan, and in the case of one or two whose names occur in Some Nineteenth Century Scotsmen. Unfortunately I trusted to what might enter, and be retained in, the storehouses of memory; but after the lapse of years many things preserved in these crypts of necessity become dim. Others, however and these the most important ones now stand out all the clearer on the horizon, and come back with distinctness to the photographic inward eye ; so that I need not say, in the words of a poet, some of whose unpublished letters will be found in these pages I seem left alive Like a sea-jelly weak on Patmos strand, To tell dry sea-beach gazers how it fared When there was mid -sea, and the mighty things. It has been described as the best of all kinds of education for men or women to live under the influence of characters that are strong, original, exalted, and that benign ; are many-sided, fertile-minded, and ideal. There is truth in the remark. When so large a part of every life has to be spent in a prosaic world of details, where mere routine becomes unfruitful if not fettering, PBEFACE vii and begets commonplace if it is not barren of result, the privilege of occasional converse with those who live in the realm of ideality, whence they step out to greet and to cheer the toilers in the actual, is great. To meet these higher men and higher women, to hear them speak, and to see how an ideal character can wreath itself with, and unveil itself through, the hindrances of the actual is perhaps the surest way of getting to know our Human Nature at its best. The next, and probably an easier, way is to learn of their conversation, their views of ' things, their ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the ' books if those good through ; books are a veracious record by those who wrote of what they know, and of experiences in which they have themselves taken part. It is for this, among other reasons, that the following pages have been written. They may contain some materials for future criticism, but I nowhere assume the role of critic, which is so easy to take up, and so unproductive when laid down. Posterity is not much the wiser if it merely gets to know the estimates of distinguished people, formed by those who had an opportunity of meeting them. Hence ' ' it is that critical biographies are as a rule so disap- pointing and useless, sometimes even pernicious. What is posterity the better for knowing the verdict of A, B, ' ' and C upon the great of old,' whose spirits still rule ' urns is us from their ; more especially when there much more of the A, B, and C, the new critics, than of the departed sage or seer in the books which the former write ? What it surely needs much more is to have an viii KETKOSPECTS adequate and trustworthy re-presentation of the past, ' and new pictures of the men and women these great ' of old as in a mirror, so that the living may be able to realise the dead as they lived and moved and had their being in the flesh. To those who wish to have the past revivified for them, and to be revivified by it, the perusal or the study of such an admirable work as our Dictionary of National Biography will not wholly suffice. That work has obtained a unique and assured place in the literature of England, and it must be consulted by everyone who wishes accurately to know the great landmarks of History in the light of Biography. But those now referred to will receive, perhaps, quite as powerful an influence from a series of visits to our great National Portrait Galleries. I do not refer to the excellent one at Trafalgar Square, but to those numerous literary Galleries which a competent reader may enter at any time, and traverse at will. Not that to the Dictionary on the one hand, or the Portrait Gallery on the other, an inferior can be but be position assigned ; they must sup- plemented. I remember a friend once asking me to meet him next day at the Dictionary of National Bio- ! He meant the National Portrait graphy Gallery ; but I thought his mistake a happy one, and the parallel between the two so just and apposite that I suggested, should he ever dine with his fellow-contributors to our noble Dictionary, he should see that the chief toast of the evening was proposed as that of ' Our National ' Portrait Gallery ! PREFACE ix But however accurate relevant and full, yet severely concise, the Dictionary articles are to the scholar, to the majority of readers they are and are only meant to be a dry epitome of facts. While more useful to posterity, and more likely to live, than the ordinary ' ' ' Memoir or ' Autobiography unless the latter be a work of genius they have not the same interest to contem- to poraries ; and them Reminiscences that are accurate as well as many-sided, even if a few things intrinsically trivial be taken up along with the more important ones, will be welcomed at least for a time. We all wish to know a good deal about our recent contemporaries which will not interest a later generation, and which it may gladly forget. Such records must of necessity contain some local but time is colourings ; needed for the removal of these, and the substitution of a clearer light. As I have said, it is my aim not to repeat what has been already written, or to walk over well-trodden ground. Even in the case of such a friend as James Martineau several of whose letters to me have been published in his Life and Letters and in Inter Amicos l I have included only those as yet unpublished, except in two instances, where they appear with addenda pre- viously omitted. In the case of Browning's letters, which were sent to Mrs. Sutherland Orr when she was writing the poet's life, but few of which she used, they are now printed nearly in extenso. 1 The originals of the 109 letters I received from him are now at Manchester College, Oxford. x EETKOSPECTS There is a well-known temptation to which every recorder of conversation is exposed, which the modern ' ' interviewer has intensified, and to which many of the interviewed succumb. It is to add to, or embellish, the that that the first to reports are given ; so question which ' ' almost every reader of Reminiscences desires an ' answer is the obvious one Are these things true ? Are the reports authentic ? Is the chronicle veracious throughout, or at least as accurate as that through which Boswell has transmitted to us the dicta of Dr. ' Johnson ? In the case of the greatest recorder of Dia- logue, no one can tell how much is a literal transcript, and how much is due to the idealisation of the writer ; and in a case so supreme, when we are in the company 1 of Socrates and Plato, we really do not need to know. But, with reference to the conversations of lesser men recorded by modern writers, the case is very different, and a general principle may easily be reached. There is no doubt that, When to the sessions of sweet silent thought We summon up remembrance of things past, imagination should be almost dormant, while memory should be ' distinct and clear.' In such circumstances alone can the office of recorder be permissible, and the result trustworthy. But many of our contemporary books and magazines contain accounts of lengthy inter- views with distinguished people, in which it is obvious even to the un-initiate that the recorder has coloured 1 We are profoundly grateful that there were no stenographers at Athens, and no typewriters.