The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2). Lady Isabel Burton
at the hour he or she pleases, and finds coffee, milk, and small rolls in the dining-room. Smoking and dawdling pass the hours till almost mid-day, when déjeuner à la fourchette, or rather a young dinner, leads very naturally up to a siesta. In the afternoon there is a little walking or driving, and even shooting in the case of the most energetic. There is a supper after nightfall, and after that dominoes or cards, or music, or conversazione, keep them awake for half the night. The even tenor of their days is broken only by a festival or a ball in the nearest town, or some pseudo Scientific Congress in a City not wholly out of reach; and so things go on from year to year, and all are happy because they look to nothing else.
Schinznach and England.
Our journey began in the early summer of 1840. My mother and sister were left at the Baths of Lucca, and my father, with Mr. Du Pré, and Edward and I, set out for Switzerland. We again travelled vetturino, and we lads cast longing eyes at the charming country which we were destined not to see again for another ten years. How melancholy we felt when on our way to the chill and dolorous North! At Schinznach I was left in charge of Mr. Du Pré, while my father and brother set out for England direct. These Hapsburg baths in the Aargau had been chosen because the abominable sulphur water, as odorous as that of Harrogate, was held as sovereign in skin complaints, and I was suffering from exanthémata, an eruption brought on by a sudden check of perspiration. These eruptions are very hard to cure, and they often embitter a man's life. The village consisted of a single Establishment, in which all nationalities met. Amongst them was an unfortunate Frenchman, who had been attacked at Calcutta with what appeared to be a leprous taint. He had tried half a dozen places to no purpose, and he had determined to blow his brains out if Schinznach failed him. The only advantage of the place was, its being within easy distance of Schaffhausen and the falls of the Rhine.
When the six weeks' cure was over, I was hurried by my guardian across France, and Southern England, to the rendezvous. The Grandmother and the two aunts, finding Great Cumberland Place too hot, had taken country quarters at Hampstead. Grandmamma Baker received us lads with something like disappointment. She would have been better contented had we been six feet high, bony as Highland cattle, with freckled faces, and cheek-bones like horns. Aunt Georgina Baker embraced and kissed her nephews with effusion. She had not been long parted from us. Mrs. Frank Burton, the other aunt, had not seen us for ten years, and of course could not recognize us.
We found two very nice little girl-cousins, who assisted us to pass the time. But the old dislike to our surroundings, returned with redoubled violence. Everything appeared to us so small, so mean, so ugly. The faces of the women were the only exception to the general rule of hideousness. The houses were so unlike houses, and more like the Nuremberg toys magnified. The outsides were so prim, so priggish, so utterly unartistic. The little bits of garden were mere slices, as if they had been sold by the inch. The interiors were cut up into such wretched little rooms, more like ship-cabins than what was called rooms in Italy. The drawing-rooms were crowded with hideous little tables, that made it dangerous to pass from one side to the other. The tables were heaped with nick-nacks, that served neither for use or show. And there was a desperate neatness and cleanness about everything that made us remember the old story of the Stoic who spat in the face of the master of the house because it was the most untidy place in the dwelling.
The Family break up.
Then came a second parting. Edward was to be placed under the charge of the Rev. Mr. Havergal, rector of some country parish. Later on, he wrote to say that "Richard must not correspond with his brother, as he had turned his name into a peculiar form of ridicule." He was in the musical line, and delighted in organ-playing. But Edward seemed to consider the whole affair a bore, and was only too happy when he could escape from the harmonious parsonage.
In the mean time I had been tried and found wanting. One of my father's sisters (Mrs. General D'Aguilar, as she called herself) had returned from India, after an uninterrupted residence of a score of years, with a large supply of children of both sexes. She had settled herself temporarily at Cambridge, to superintend the education of her eldest son, John Burton D'Aguilar, who was intended for the Church, and who afterwards became a chaplain in the Bengal Establishment. Amongst her many acquaintances was a certain Professor Sholefield, a well-known Grecian. My father had rather suspected that very little had been done in the house, in the way of classical study, during the last two years. The Professor put me through my paces in Virgil and Homer, and found me lamentably deficient. I did not even know who Isis was! worse still, it was found out that I, who spoke French and Italian and their dialects like a native, who had a considerable smattering of Bearnais, Spanish, and Provençale, barely knew the Lord's Prayer, broke down in the Apostles' Creed, and had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles—a terrible revelation!
1. "The Sword," in three large works nobly planned out, when after the first part was brought out, death frustrated the other two.—I. B.
2. There are three hundred and sixty-five of these pits, one for every day in the year.—I. B.
3. In 1861 he painted Richard's and my portraits as a wedding gift.—I. B.
CHAPTER IV.
OXFORD.
As it was Long Vacation at Oxford, and I could not take rooms at once in Trinity College, where my name had been put down, it was necessary to place me somewhere out of mischief. At the intervention of friends, a certain Doctor Greenhill agreed to lodge and coach me till the opening term. The said doctor had just married a relation of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, and he had taken his bride to Paris, in order to show her the world and to indulge himself in a little dissecting. Meanwhile I was placed pro tem. with another medical don, Dr. Ogle, and I enjoyed myself in that house. The father was a genial man, and he had nice sons and pretty daughters. As soon as Dr. Greenhill returned to his house in High Street, Oxford, I was taken up there by my father, and was duly consigned to the new tutor. Mr. Du Pré vanished, and was never seen again.
The first sight of Oxford struck me with a sense of appal. "O Domus antiqua et religiosa," cried Queen Elizabeth, in 1664, standing opposite Pembroke College, which the Dons desecrated in 1875. I could not imagine how such fine massive and picturesque old buildings as the colleges could be mixed up with the mean little houses that clustered around them, looking as if they were built of cardboard. In after days, I remembered the feeling, when looking at the Temple of the Sun in Palmyra, surrounded by its Arab huts, like swallows' nests planted upon a palace wall. And everything, except the colleges, looked so mean.
The good old Mitre was, if not the only, at least the chief hostelry of the place, and it had the outward and visible presence of a pot-house. The river with the classical name of Isis, was a mere moat, and its influent, the Cherwell, was a ditch. The country around, especially just after Switzerland, looked flat and monotonous in the extreme. The skies were brown-grey, and, to an Italian nose, the smell of the coal smoke was a perpetual abomination. Queer beings walked the streets, dressed in aprons that hung behind, from their shoulders, and caps consisting of a square, like that of a lancer's helmet, planted upon a semi-oval to contain the head. These queer creatures were carefully shaved, except, perhaps, a diminutive mutton-cutlet on each side of their face, and the most serious sort were invariably dressed in vestibus nigris aut sub fuscis.
Moreover, an indescribable appearance of donnishness or incipient donnishness pervaded the whole lot. The juniors looked like schoolboys who aspired to be schoolmasters, and the seniors as if their aspirations had been successful. I asked after the famous Grove of Trinity, where Charles I. used to walk when tired of Christ Church meadows, and which the wits called Daphne. It had long been felled, and the ground was covered with buildings.
At last term opened, and I transferred myself from Dr. Greenhill