The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2). Lady Isabel Burton
a master-breaker-of-blockades, and might readily have taken into his head to pay the Ambassador a visit.
I looked forward to a welcome and found one; a man who had married my aunt, Robert Bagshaw, of Dovercourt, M.P., and quondam Calcutta merchant, who had saved from impending bankruptcy the house of Alexander and Co., to which Lady Stratford belonged.
Nothing quainter than the contrast between that highly respectable middle-class British peer and the extreme wildness of his surroundings. There were but two exceptions to the general rule of eccentricity—one, Lord Napier and Ettrick with his charming wife, and the other, Odo (popularly called "O don't!") Russell, who died as Lord Ampthill, Ambassador to Berlin. It was, by-the-by, no bad idea to appoint this high-bred and average talented English gentleman to the Court of Prince Bismarck, who disliked and despised nothing more thoroughly than the pert little political, the "Foreign Office pet" of modern days.
Foremost on the roll stood Alison, who died Minister at Teheran. He was in character much more a Greek than an Englishman, with a peculiar finesse, not to put too fine a point upon it, which made him highly qualified to deal with a certain type of Orientals. He knew Romaic perfectly, Turkish well, Persian a little, and a smattering of Arabic; so that, most unlike the average order of ignorant secretaries and attachés, he was able to do good work. He seemed to affect eccentricity, went out walking with a rough coat with a stick torn from a tree, whence his cognomen "The Bear with the Ragged Staff," and at his breakfasts visitors were unpleasantly astonished by a weight suddenly mounting their shoulders in the shape of a bear-cub with cold muzzle and ugly claws. He managed to hold his own with his testy and rageous old Chief, and the following legend was told of him:—"Damn your eyes, Mr. Alison, why was not that despatch sent?" "Damn your Excellency's eyes, it went this morning." Miladi also seemed to regard his comical figure with much favour. At Teheran he did little good, having become unhappily addicted to "tossing the elbow," which in an evil hour was reported home by my late friend Edward Eastwick; and he married a wealthy Levantine widow, who predeceased him. On this occasion he behaved uncommonly well, by returning all her large fortune to her family.
Next to him in office, and far higher in public esteem, ranked Percy Smythe, who succeeded his brother as Lord Strangford. Always of the weakest possible constitution, and so purblind that when reading he drew the paper across his nose, he fulfilled my idea of the typical linguist in the highest sense of the word; in fact, I never saw his equal except, perhaps, Professor Palmer, who was murdered by Arábi's orders almost within sight of Suez. Strangford seemed to take in a language through every pore, and to have time for all its niceties and eccentricities: for instance, he could speak Persian like a Shirázi, and also with the hideous drawl of a Hindostani. Yet his health sent him to bed every night immediately after dinner, for which he was more than once taken severely to task by Lady Stratford. He dressed in the seediest of black frock-coats, and was once mightily offended by a Turkish officer, who, overhearing us talking in Persian about "Tasáwaf" (Sufi-ism), joined in the conversation. He treated me with great regard because I was in the gorgeous Bashi-Bazouk uniform, blazing with gold, but looked upon Lord Strangford with such contempt that the latter exclaimed, "Hang the fellow! Can't he see that I am a gentleman?" I then told him that an Eastern judges entirely by dress, and that, as I was gorgeous, I was supposed to be the swell, and that, as his coat was very shabby, he was taken for a poor interpreter, probably my dragoman, and induced him to change for the future.
Some years afterwards, when he came to the title, he married Emily Beaufort, the result of reviewing her book "Syrian Shrines," etc. The choice was a mistake; she was far too like him in body and mind, with a strong dash of Israelitish blood, to be a success matrimonially speaking. Had he taken to wife a comely "crummy" little girl with blue eyes, barley-sugar hair, and the rest to match, he might have lived much longer. But the lady was an overmatch for him. When she was a little tot of twelve I saw her at the head of her father's, the hydrographer's table, laying down the law of professional matters to grey-headed Admirals. The last of the Staff was General Mansfield, an ill-conditioned and aggressive man, who held General Beatson in especial dislike for "prostitution of military rank." I have the most unpleasant remembrance of him; he afterwards became Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India, and his conduct in the "Affair of the Pickles" ought to have caused the recall of "Lord Sandhurst."
The Ambassador, whose name was at that time in every mouth, was as remarkable in appearance as in character and career. When near sixty years of age he had still the clear-cut features and handsome face of his cousin, whom he loved to call the "Great Canning," and under whom, he, like Lord Palmerston, had began official life as private secretary. One of the cleanest and smoothest shaven of old men, he had a complexion white and red as a Westphalia ham, and his silver locks gave him a venerable and pleasing appearance; whilst his chin, that most characteristic feature, showed, in repose, manliness, and his "Kaiser-blue" eye was that of the traditional Madonna, only at excited moments the former tilted up with an expression of reckless obstinacy, and the latter flashed fire like an enraged feline's. The everyday look of the face was diplomatic, an icy impassibility (evidently put on, and made natural by long habit); but it changed to the scowl of a Medusa in fits of rage, and in joyous hours, such as sitting at dinner near the beautiful Lady George Paget—whose like I never saw—it was harmonious and genial as a day in spring.
Such was the personal appearance of the man who, together with the Emperor Nicholas, one equally, if not more remarkable, both in body and in mind, set the whole Western World in a blaze. I heard the origin of the blood-feud minutely told by the late Lord Clanricarde, one of the most charming raconteurs and original conversationalists ever met at a London dinner-table. Mr. Stratford Canning became, in early manhood, Chargé d'affaires at Constantinople, and took a prominent part in the Treaty of Bucharest, which the Czar found, to speak mildly, unpalatable. However, some years after, when the Embassy at St. Petersburg fell vacant, the Emperor refused to receive this personâ ingrata, and aroused susceptibilities which engendered a life-long hatred and a lust for revenge. Lastly, after the affair of 1848, the "Eltchi" persuaded his unhappy tool, the feeble-minded Sultan, Abd Al-Majid, whom he scolded and abused like a naughty schoolboy, now by threats then by promises, to refuse giving up the far-famed Hungarian refugees. This again became well known to all the world, and thus a private and personal pique between two elderly gentlemen of high degree, involved half Europe in hideous war, and was one of the worst disasters ever known to English history, by showing the world how England could truckle to France, and allow her to play the leading part.
Lord Stratford had, as often happens to shrewder men, completely mistaken his vocation. He told me more than once that his inclination was wholly to the life of a littérateur, and he showed himself unfit for taking any, save the humblest, rôle among the third-rates. He had lived his life in the East without learning a word of Turkish, Persian, or Arabic.
He wrote "poetry," and, amid the jeers of his staff, he affixed to a rustic seat near Therapia, where once Lady Stratford had sat, a copy of verses beginning—
"A wife, a mother to her children dear,"
with rhyme "rested here," and reason to match. After his final return home he printed a little volume of antiquated "verse or worse" with all the mediocrity which the gods and the columns disallow, and which would hardly have found admittance to the poet's corner of a country paper. His last performance in this line was a booklet entitled, "Why I am a Christian" (he of all men!), which provoked a shout of laughter amongst his friends. They owned that, mentally, he was a fair modern Achilles—
"Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis acer;"
but of his "Christianity," the popular saying was, "He is a Christian, and he never forgives." His characteristic was vindictiveness; he could not forget (and here he was right), but also he could not forgive (and here he was wrong). One instance: he tried to hunt out of the service Grenville Murray, whose "Roving Englishman" probably owed much of its charm to Dickens's staff in Household Words. Yet Murray, despite all his faults, was a capable man, and a Government more elastic and far-seeing and less "respectable" than that of England, would have greatly profited by his services. Lord Stratford could not endure badinage, he had no sense for and of humour; witness the scene between him and Louis Napoleon's Ambassador, General Baraguay d'Hilliers, recorded by Mr. Consul Skene in his