the spirit
by it, as by Channing's; but somehow it has stuck in my memory all these
forty-eight years.

Often I stayed for a few days at a time at Channing's house; his wife
was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a
beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married,
when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of
Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph.
She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did
the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs.
Channing's face of sorrow and distress when, one day at dinner, I upset
into my lap my plate, which she had just filled with Irish stew--one
of my best-loved dishes. "Frank never does that," she murmured, as she
wiped me up; "never-never!" Nobody looked cheerful, and I never got over
that mortification.

XI

Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you
marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--
"The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I
ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire,
pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library
in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and
voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the os-rotundus
sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of
it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--
Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks
through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman--
Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole
line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new
sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--
Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the
elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine
will always rest on it.

The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my
mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by
the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire,
it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those
regions for years--two years at least; and I was astonished and almost
incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or
eight months only. It was long enough.

In the course of the pr