IN VERSE (_continued_)

XXIX. VERBAL INFELICITIES

XXX. THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS

XXXI. CHILDREN

XXXII. LETTER-WRITING

XXXIII. OFFICIALDOM

XXXIV. AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK

INDEX.

I.

LINKS WITH THE PAST.

Of the celebrated Mrs. Disraeli her husband is reported to have said,
"She is an excellent creature, but she never can remember which came
first, the Greeks or the Romans." In my walk through life I have
constantly found myself among excellent creatures of this sort. The
world is full of vague people, and in the average man, and still more in
the average woman, the chronological sense seems to be entirely wanting.
Thus, when I have occasionally stated in a mixed company that my first
distinct recollection was the burning of Covent Garden Theatre, I have
seen a general expression of surprised interest, and have been told, in
a tone meant to be kind and complimentary, that my hearers would hardly
have thought that my memory went back so far. The explanation has been
that these excellent creatures had some vague notions of _Rejected
Addresses_ floating in their minds, and confounded the burning of Covent
Garden Theatre in 1856 with that of Drury Lane Theatre in 1809. It was
pleasant to feel that one bore one's years so well as to make the error
possible.

But events, however striking, are only landmarks in memory. They are
isolated and detached, and begin and end in themselves. The real
interest of one's early life is in its Links with the Past, through the
old people whom one has known. Though I place my first distinct
recollection in 1856, I have memories more or less hazy of an earlier
date.

There was an old Lady Robert Seymour, who lived in Portland Place, and
died there in 1855, in her ninety-first year. Probably she is my most
direct link with the past, for she carried down to the time of the
Crimean War the habits and phraseology of Queen Charlotte's early Court.
"Goold" of course she said for gold, and "yaller" for yellow, and
"laylock" for lilac. She laid the stress on the second syllable of
"balcony." She called her maid her "'ooman;" instead of sleeping at a
place, she "lay" there, and when she consulted the doctor she spoke of
having "used the 'potticary."

There still lives, in full possession of all her faculties, a venerable
lady who can say that her husband was born at Boston when America was a
British dependency. This is the widow of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, who
was born i