The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

      very much smaller annual Premium than if he had then begun to insure it. 3. A useful Library, worth more than £200, besides the books bought out of his current Income during the period….

      The picture on the opposite page is one of Mr. Dodgson’s illustrations in Misch-Masch, a periodical of the nature of The Rectory Umbrella, except that it contained printed stories and poems by the editor, cut out of the various newspapers to which he had contributed them. Of the comic papers of that day Punch, of course, held the foremost place, but it was not without rivals; there was a certain paper called Diogenes, then very near its end, which imitated Punch’s style, and in 1853 the proprietor of The Illustrated News, at that time one of the most opulent publishers in London, started The Comic Times. A capable editor was found in Edmund Yates; “Phiz” and other well-known artists and writers joined the staff, and 100,000 copies of the first number were printed.

       STUDIES FROM ENGLISH POETS II “Alas! What Boots” Milton’s Lucidas.

      Among the contributors was Frank Smedley, author of “Frank Fairleigh.” Though a confirmed invalid, and condemned to spend most of his days on a sofa, Mr. Smedley managed to write several fine novels, full of the joy of life, and free from the least taint of discontent or morbid feeling. He was one of those men—one meets them here and there—whose minds rise high above their bodily infirmities; at moments of depression, which come to them as frequently, if not more frequently, than to other men, they no doubt feel their weakness, and think themselves despised, little knowing that we, the stronger ones in body, feel nothing but admiration as we watch the splendid victory of the soul over its earthly companion which their lives display.

      It was through Frank Smedley that Mr. Dodgson became one of the contributors to The Comic Times. Several of his poems appeared in it, and Mr. Yates wrote to him in the kindest manner, expressing warm approval of them. When The Comic Times changed hands in 1856, and was reduced to half its size, the whole staff left it and started a new venture, The Train. They were joined by Sala, whose stories in Household Words were at that time usually ascribed by the uninitiated to Charles Dickens. Mr. Dodgson’s contributions to The Train included the following: “Solitude” (March, 1856); “Novelty and Romancement” (October, 1856); “The Three Voices” (November, 1856); “The Sailor’s Wife” (May, 1857); and last, but by no means least, “Hiawatha’s Photographing” (December, 1857). All of these, except “Novelty and Romancement,” have since been republished in “Rhyme? and Reason?” and “Three Sunsets.”

      The last entry in Mr. Dodgson’s Diary for this year reads as follows:—

      I am sitting alone in my bedroom this last night of the old year, waiting for midnight. It has been the most eventful year of my life: I began it a poor bachelor student, with no definite plans or expectations; I end it a master and tutor in Ch. Ch., with an income of more than £300 a year, and the course of mathematical tuition marked out by God’s providence for at least some years to come. Great mercies, great failings, time lost, talents misapplied—such has been the past year.

      His Diary is full of such modest depreciations of himself and his work, interspersed with earnest prayers (too sacred and private to be reproduced here) that God would forgive him the past, and help him to perform His holy will in the future. And all the time that he was thus speaking of himself as a sinner, and a man who was utterly falling short of his aim, he was living a life full of good deeds and innumerable charities, a life of incessant labour and unremitting fulfilment of duty. So, I suppose, it is always with those who have a really high ideal; the harder they try to approach it the more it seems to recede from them, or rather, perhaps, it is impossible to be both “the subject and spectator” of goodness. As Coventry Patmore wrote:—

      Become whatever good you see;

       Nor sigh if, forthwith, fades from view

       The grace of which you may not be

       The Subject and spectator too.

      The reading of “Alton Locke” turned his mind towards social subjects. “If the book were but a little more definite,” he writes, “it might stir up many fellow-workers in the same good field of social improvement. Oh that God, in His good providence, may make me hereafter such a worker! But alas, what are the means? Each one has his own nostrum to propound, and in the Babel of voices nothing is done. I would thankfully spend and be spent so long as I were sure of really effecting something by the sacrifice, and not merely lying down under the wheels of some irresistible Juggernaut.”

      He was for some time the editor of College Rhymes, a Christ Church paper, in which his poem, “A Sea Dirge” (afterwards republished in “Phantasmagoria,” and again in “Rhyme? and Reason?”), first appeared. The following verses were among his contributions to the same magazine:—

      I painted her a gushing thing,

       With years perhaps a score

       I little thought to find they were

       At least a dozen more;

       My fancy gave her eyes of blue,

       A curly auburn head:

       I came to find the blue a green,

       The auburn turned to red.