Chapter XIV: Part 14

Wordsworth's eyes are better, but not well, nor ever likely to be.
Reading inflames them and so does composing. I believe it was a series
of Highland Sonnets that brought on the last attack, so much worse
than any he had had before. He read me several that I had not seen nor
heard before, many of them admirably good; also a long, romantic
wizard and fairy poem, in the time of Merlin and King Arthur, very
pretty, but not of the first order. But I should not have expected
anything so good from him, which was so much out of his beat. He has
not advanced much in his knowledge of Alfred; but he is very modest in
his refusal to praise attributing his want of admiration to a
deficiency in himself, whether from the stiffness of old age, which
cannot accommodate itself to a new style of beauty, or that the
compass of his sympathies has been narrowed by flowing too long and
strongly in one direction. (_N.B._ He is not answerable for the
English that I am writing.) But he doubts not that Alfred's style has
its own beauty, though he wants the faculty to enter fully into it,
alleging as a parallel case the choruses in "Samson Agonistes" the
measure of which he has never been able to enjoy, which comes to
perhaps as high a compliment as a negative compliment can be. He spoke
so wisely and graciously that I had half a mind to try him with a poem
or two, but that would have been more perhaps than he meant. And
indeed it is always so pleasant to hear a distinguished man
unaffectedly disclaiming the office of censor, that I never think it
fair to take him at his word. I have given a copy of Alfred's second
volume to Hartley Coleridge, who, I trust, will make more of it. He
had only seen it for a few minutes, and was greatly behind the age,
though he admitted that A. T. was undoubtedly a man of genius; and was
going to say something about the _Quarterly_ in a Review of _The
Doctor_, which he was, or is, writing for Blackwood. I also sent him
yesterday a copy of Charles Tennyson, accompanied with one of my most
gentlemanly letters.

Spedding was now nearly six-and-twenty, and had no settled plan of life before him. "For myself," he says, "I am unsettled in all my prospects and plans. I am, in fact, doing nothing, but I flatter myself I am pausing on the brink to take a good look at the different ways of life which are open to me before I take the fatal plunge."

At the end of 1834 he invited Thompson, who was then at York, to visit him at Mirehouse.

Excuses shall not be admitted, at least not such as yours. Is there
not a stage-coach which fears God, and do you _for that reason_ refuse
to employ it? You ought rather to encourage it. What is a little bile
or rheumatism, compared with the advancement of Truth, and the
conservation of the Faith that is on the earth? Moreover, every
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a coach leaves Kendal at 8 o'clock in
the morning, and arrives in Keswick about one, having traversed in the
short space of five hours many miles of the finest scenery in the
country, containing both other things and five lakes, and the
dwelling-places of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Hamilton[104]
(more commonly known as Cyril Thornton). As for your time lost last
term, that I know, from my experience of your character, to be a
fiction of modesty: and as for your hopes of making up for it at home,
that I know, from my experience of my own character, to be humbug.
Besides, you write as one balancing his own desires according to a
principle of enlightened self-interest. You forget that it is not for
your own pleasure, but for my profit, that I ask you to come. Am I not
sliding daily from bad to worse? Am I not losing the race I do not
run? Am I not learning to look on all knowledge as vanity, all labour
as sorrow? for not the knowledge for which men labour is profitable,
but the labour only, and yet who can labour for that which profiteth
not? Have I not already parted with the hope, and am I not now parting
with the wish, to advance? Am I performing any duty? Am I making any
money? Am I not falling away from the Apostolic mind, notwithstanding?
Am I not taking pleasure in the shooting of snipes? Am I not in danger
of having a bad German pronunciation for evermore? Roll these things
in your mind, and then roll yourself into the coach. I will meet you
at Ambleside, if you like.

I had read the review of Wordsworth several times over: and thought
the criticism (except. excipiend.) good, and the moral philosophy
superb. The passage about the moon looking round her, etc., I of
course felt to be a blunder, though I was less surprised than sorry to
see it. It seems to me to chime in too well with what I marked as the
defect of his preface to _P. v. A._,[105] so that I fear it is not a
negligent criticism, as one might have hoped: but an opinion well
weighed and carefully adopted. I wonder what he would say to Ebenezer
Elliott, with his flowers and mountains, for a taste?

Welcome then again
Love-listening Primrose! tho' not parted long
We meet like lovers after years of pain.
Oh thou bringst blissful childhood back to me,
Thou still art loveliest in the lowest place,
Still as of old Day glows with love for thee,
And reads our heavenly Father in thy face.
Surely thy thoughts are humble and devout,
Flower of the pensive gold! for why should heaven
Deny to thee his noblest boon of thought,
If to Earth's demigods 'tis vainly given?
Answer me, Sunless Sister, Thou hast speech
Though silent Fragrance is thy eloquence,
Beauty thy language, and thy smile might teach
Ungrateful man to pardon providence.

He would call it a very bold figure of speech: figure of _speech_,
quotha! However, Philip is a noble fellow, and the apology for this
piece of criticism is so wise and so good that one can hardly regret
that an apology was needed. I have sent for the citation of Will.
Shakespeare, though rather with the desire than the expectation of
great delight. I read a few extracts in the _Atlas_, with which I was
not at all struck, or, if at all, not favourably; but that does not go
for much, as I did not know who it was by, or anything about it, and
the extracts were most probably ill-chosen. But to tell you the truth
I never took much to Landor. To be sure I never read much of him, but
I have often had the book in my hand. Perhaps I might have liked him
better if the speakers had been named Philander and Strephon, and
Philalethes and the like, instead of Bacon, and Hooker, and Raleigh,
and so following. I shall have every chance this time: for besides the
prejudice derived from your praise, I am by no means easy in feeling
no great respect for a writer of whom _P. v. A._ speaks so very
highly. There is something in Philip's intellect which commands more
than my usual reverence. More _genial_ minds I have met with, but for
strength, and integrity, and _discretion_ of understanding, I do not
know his equal. He puts me in mind of F. Malkin. We must have him
change his mind, though, about the moon and the streams. I read the
review of Coleridge in the _Quarterly_ the other day. The parts which
are not Coleridge's own might have been better, but they are well
enough.

The spring of 1835 was memorable at Mirehouse for a visit of Tennyson and FitzGerald. That this made a vivid impression on FitzGerald is evident from a letter which he wrote after Spedding's death to his niece, when there was some idea of gathering together his miscellaneous essays:

"I rejoice," he says, "to hear of a Collection, or Reprint, of his
stray works.... I used to say he wrote 'Virgilian Prose.' One only of
his I did not care for; but that, I doubt not, was because of the
subject, not of the treatment: his own printed Report of a Speech he
made in what was called the 'Quinquaginta Club' Debating Society (not
the Union) at Cambridge about the year 1831. This speech his Father
got him to recall and recompose in Print; wishing always that his Son
should turn his faculties to such public Topics rather than to the
Poets, of whom he had seen enough in Cumberland not to have much
regard for: Shelley for one, at one time stalking about the mountains
with Pistols, and other such Vagaries. I do not think he was much an
admirer of Wordsworth (I don't know about Southey), and I well
remember that when I was at M_e_rehouse (as Miss Bristowe would have
us call it), with A. Tennyson in 1835, Mr. Spedding grudged his Son's
giving up much time and thought to consultations about Morte
d'Arthur's, Lords of Burleigh, etc., which were then in MS. He more
than once questioned me, who was sometimes present at the meetings,
'Well, Mr. F., and what is it? Mr. Tennyson reads, and Jem
criticizes:--is that it?' etc. This, while I might be playing Chess
with dear Mrs. Spedding, in May, while the Daffodils were dancing
outside the Hall door."

"At the end of May," he writes to Mrs. Kemble, "we went to lodge for a
week at Windermere--where Wordsworth's new volume of _Yarrow
Revisited_ reached us. W. was then at his home, but Tennyson would not
go to visit him: and of course I did not: nor even saw him."

In the summer of 1835 Thompson spent the Long Vacation at the Lakes, and Spedding was engaged in securing lodgings for him and his pupils, while Tennyson was still at Mirehouse.

"I am going," he writes, "with Alfred, I believe, to Buttermere, and
so have not time to tell you how much I am rejoiced that your destiny
should have dragged you hither--nor to discuss the London Review--nor
to tell you about Fitz and Alfred Tennyson, and Hartley Coleridge,
and W. W., etc., only that Alfred is very gruff and unmanageable, and
the weather very cold. He desires to be remembered. Fitz is gone."

A few days later he says:

Alfred left us about a week since, homeward bound, but meaning to
touch at Brookfield's on his way. The weather has been much finer
since he went; certainly, while he was here, our northern sun did not
display himself to advantage. Nevertheless, I think he took in more
pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not
know his almost personal dislike of the Present, whatever it may be.
Hartley Coleridge is mightily taken with him; and, after the fourth
bottom of gin, deliberately thanked Heaven (under me, I believe, or me
under Heaven, I forget which) for having brought them acquainted. Said
Hartley was busy with an article on "Macbeth," to appear (the
vegetable spirits permitting) in the next _Blackwood_. He confessed to
a creed touching Destiny which was new to me: denying Free Will (if I
understood him right) _in toto_; but at the same time maintaining that
man is solely and entirely answerable for whatever evil he does: not
merely that he is to suffer for it, which I could understand, but that
he is _answerable_ for it which I do not. Now this, I think, is not
fair. I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount, he would and would
not--sulky one, although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him;
and would have been more so had the state of his household permitted,
which I am sorry to say is full of sickness.... By a letter from D. D.
H[eath] received to-day I infer that _Subscription no Bondage_ is out;
which I shall accordingly send for. I am sorry it is not to be
understood in the sense of "Killing no Murder," which seems to me,
till I be further enlightened, the only sort of construction which
will make sense of it. D. D. H. looketh on this pamphlet as the final
cause of the system of subscription at Oxford, and, now that the
effect hath been accomplished doth heartily wish that custom may be
discontinued. Euge, D. D. H.! For myself, since Alfred went, my time
has been chiefly employed (that is, all my time which was not occupied
in exercising the puppies) upon three several books: to wit, _Ralph
Esher_, a sort of novel by Leigh Hunt, containing a most graceful and
lively portraiture of Charles II.'s times, a good deal of rot about
Truth and Love, and a good deal of metaphysics, hard to understand in
parts, but in parts (to me, at least) very deep and touching. Item,
_Isaac Comnenus_, a Play (Murray, 1827): by Henry Taylor, as Southey
who lent me the book informs me; a work much in the tone and [style
of] _P. v. A._, and though far behind in design and execution by [no
means] an unworthy precursor. It has some passages as fine as anything
in _Philip_. Item, thirdly and lastly, Basil Montagu's _Life of
Bacon_, a work of much labour both on the writer's part and the
reader's, but well meant, and if not itself a good one containing all
the materials necessary for a good one, which is saying a great deal.
I have not read all the notes. In fact I believe they are all
contained in the text. I should think that on a moderate computation,
half the two volumes is a reprint of the other half, for if there are
a few pages which are printed twice over, there are many half and
quarter pages which are repeated four or five times. I should half
like to review it.

If he had acted on his own suggestion we might not have had Macaulay's _Essay_, and certainly should not have had the _Evenings with a Reviewer_. This is the first intimation of his interest in what was to be the work of his life. It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor, the author of _Philip van Artevelde_, which influenced his occupation for the next six years.

"At this time," says Sir Henry in his Autobiography, "I obtained
another relief, and in obtaining it obtained a friend for life. James
Spedding was the younger son of a Cumberland squire who had been a
friend of my father's in former, though I think they had not met in
latter days. In the notes to _Van Artevelde_ I had quoted a passage
from an admirable speech of his spoken in a debating club at Cambridge
when he was an undergraduate. This led to my making his acquaintance;
and when some very laborious business of detail had to be executed, I
obtained authority to offer him the employment with the remuneration
of £150 a year. He was in a difficulty at the time as to the choice of
a profession, and feeling that life without business and occupation
of some kind was dangerous, was glad to accept this employment as one
which might answer the purpose well enough, if he proved suited to it,
and if not might be relinquished without difficulty and exchanged for
some other. I wrote to Mr. Southey, 24th January 1836:

"'Spedding has been and will be invaluable, and they owe me much for
him. He is regarded on all hands, not only as a man of first-rate
capacity, but as having quite a genius for business. I, for my part,
have never seen anything like him in business on this side Stephen....
When I contemplate the easy labours of Stephen and one or two others I
am disposed to think that there are giants in _these_ days.'

"For six years Spedding worked away with universal approbation, and
all this time he would have been willing to accept a post of précis
writer with £300 a year, or any other such recognised position, and
attach himself permanently to the office. But none such was placed at
his disposal ... and he took the opportunity of the Whig government
going out in 1841 to give up his employment. He then applied himself
to edit the works and vindicate the fame of Lord Bacon. In 1847, on
Sir James Stephen's retirement, the office of Under Secretary of State
with £2000 a year was offered to him by Lord Grey, before it was
offered to me, and he could not be induced to accept it. He could not
be brought to believe, what no one else doubted, that he was equal to
the duties.

"Be this as it may, the fact that the man being well known and close
at hand for six years, who could have been had for £300 a year in
1841, should have been let slip, though he was thought worth £2000 a
year in 1847, if not a rare, is a clear example of the little heed
given by the Government of this country to the choice and use of
instruments."

The exact date of Spedding's beginning work at the Colonial Office is not known, but it must have been between the middle of June 1835 and the end of August,[106] for by that time he found that Downing Street was "no place for the indulgence of the individual genius." In a letter to Thompson he writes:

I did take the liberty of insinuating a scoff at a Spanish Governor in
one of my Despatches, but H. T. said it was clever and would not do.
Said H. T. rises day by day in my esteem. He is not the least stiff or
awful, but very gentle and majestic. He has a great deal of P. v. A.
in him. But we do not talk much except on matters of business, which,
however, rises in his hands to the dignity of statesmanship. I have
not yet ascertained the contingencies on which my stay here depends,
but I should think it probable that I may in the end have the offer of
a permanent appointment in the office. If I have, I mean to take it,
purely from a sense of duty; that I may have a nominal employment to
satisfy impertinent enquiries withal, and perhaps also (as I dream in
my more romantic moments) that I may have a real employment to
discipline my own soul withal. The prospect of its leading to wealth
or dignity is so small under present circumstances as not to be worth
taking into account, yet not exactly so neither, for any prospect of
any thing to come, however faint and distant, dignifies an employment
with a relationship to the future and the indefinite.

I meant to have gone to Kitlands to-day, but the coach was full.
Recollect that _you_ are not a man of many cares new taken up, and
therefore may find time to shower your wiser meditations upon a sheet
of paper, which addressed to me under cover to "R. W. Hay, Esq., Under
Secretary of State, Colonial Office, Downing Street," will not be lost
upon one who sometimes did but observe and wonder, but has now to
enquire and dispatch.

Thompson had been with a reading party at Keswick during the summer, but had proved a bad correspondent.

"I have heard," Spedding writes in November, "occasionally from
Mirehouse dim intimations of your supposed existence; and latterly I
have seen Martineau, to whom I have carefully pointed out the weak
points in your character, which he had not observed. I have reason to
believe that I am rising rapidly in public estimation, and I have only
to pray that I may not become too sufficient for my place. My sense of
Duty has already been appealed to in the most flattering manner, to
draw me to the undertaking of nobler business, which, being capable
of, I have no right (it is said) to decline. My capacity, it would
seem, is beyond doubt; and, as it has been evinced without any effort
or observation of mine, perhaps the best way after all will be to let
it have its own way and trouble my soul no more about it. Turn it
adrift in the world, leave it to find its own market and provide its
own goods, and if my soul (which would be a stranger in such
pilgrimage) should return in after years to enquire after it, who
knows how great she may find it grown? P. v. A. is away for his
holidays. If you can suggest a good subject for a dramatic romance out
of English or Scotch history between the Conquest and the time of
Elizabeth, you shall thereby do him a good turn, and perhaps get
praised in a note. Helps has just been here asking for information
about Cambridge in general, more particularly about you and Blakesley.
I could only tell him what I knew of you, which you must confess is
not much to your credit. Sterling has established himself and his
family in Bayswater, and gives tea parties to the wiser minds. I am
going thither to-night. Garden (I understand from himself, writing
from Carstairs) is to curatise in Cornwall. D. D. H. thinks there is
humour in an equity draft.... My own career is as far from being
marked out as ever. There is no present prospect of a vacancy here,
and I cannot get any body to advise me to accept it if there were."

In the following year Thompson was appointed to the Head Mastership of the recently founded Leicester and Leicestershire Collegiate School, and at the opening ceremony on August 9, 1836, he delivered an address, of which Spedding says:

I have read your speech, not with the distant and respectful
admiration, the wonder broken off, which I am apt to call _faith_, but
with the deliberate admiration of a man who understands and strongly
assents. I see your audience had sense enough to utter loud cheers,
but I want to know whether they had sense enough to see that such a
speech ought not to be let pass away in a newspaper, but to be
provided with some permanent, portable, and self-subsisting existence.
If the proceedings of the day are to be published in a pamphlet, I
should like to invest money in a few copies. If not, I shall think
about printing your part of them in a legible shape on my own
account.... G. Farish is going to Madeira, with Sterling, I believe.
James F. speaks hopefully of the latter, but is more alarmed about his
brother.

In a letter to Allen we get a glimpse of Tennyson:

Alfred Tennyson has reappeared, and is going to-day or to-morrow to
Florence, or to Killarney, or to Madeira, or to some place where some
ship is going--he does not know where. He has been on a visit to a
madhouse for the last fortnight (not as a patient), and has been
delighted with the mad people, whom he reports the most agreeable and
the most reasonable persons he has met with. The keeper is Dr. Allen
(any relation of yours?), with whom he had been greatly taken!

Again writing to Thompson in October 1840 he says:

I have been studying Alfred Tennyson's MSS., and I send you a copy of
a poem which I think he once repeated to you and me, and which we
neither of us much entered into. Reading it again the other day, I was
surprised with the power and beauty of it, and I now think it wants
nothing but a better name, or, I should rather say, a historical
foundation. I would have it put into the mouth of some noted man
(among the many such that must have been) involved in a marriage which
he does not like, in violation of a pre-existing attachment. The
imagining of such situations for the mere purpose of entering into the
feelings which belong to them has something unwholesome in it, to my
fancy; but the situation being given (whether in fact or fiction),
there is no harm in turning it into poetry.

In 1840 Lord Lyndhurst was a candidate for the office of High Steward of the University of Cambridge in opposition to Lord Lyttelton. Spedding voted for the latter.

"I went down to Cambridge," he writes to Thompson, "to support Lord
Lyttelton in his late distinguished defeat, of which you have, of
course, heard all particulars with apostolic embellishments and
illustrations both from other apostolic souls and from Merivale. I
have been happy in being able in these trying circumstances to
preserve my natural tranquillity. My view of the nature of the contest
is this: The University would select Lord Lyndhurst as the sort of man
whom a University should delight to honour. A dissentient minority say
not content. The majority reply to the dissentients, 'Why divide? You
see you cannot win.' The minority rejoins, 'Never mind; divide we
will, win or not win. If Lord Lyndhurst is to be selected for such an
honour as this, it shall be deliberately and not by accident. The
objections shall be formally brought forward and formally overruled.'
The bringing of the question to the poll I consider as an appeal to
the constituency to consider what they were about; and, in spite of
the result, I am glad it has been brought to this issue. For the
credit of the University it was fit it should be known that there were
500 dissentients, and for the instruction of mankind it was fit it
should be known that there was a majority of two masters of arts to
one who thought Lord Lyndhurst the proper man to receive the honours
and dignities of the University. Had I been an enemy I should have
voted in the majority; but being a dutiful, though not perhaps a very
respectful son, I was glad of an opportunity of making the 586 into
587."

The friends of Lord Lyndhurst made every effort to secure his election, and we learn from his Life by Sir Theodore Martin that he was only induced to be a candidate on condition that his return would be certain. The majority was 480.

Thompson, who had returned to Cambridge, was at this time in feeble health, and, as it was not known where a letter would find him, FitzGerald wrote under cover to Spedding, who was still at the Colonial Office. The letter does not appear to have been preserved, but it suggested to Spedding some criticism of the theatres and actors of the time which is not without interest at the present day.

"Fitz," he writes on November 25, 1840, "has forwarded this to me that
I may direct it properly, and as it is not sealed I have made free
with the contents. The meaning of the writing on the wall had
hitherto escaped me, I confess, but the effect of my head in the Pit
has often occurred to me as something unseemly, like Scriptures out of
Church; inasmuch as when I am by myself I always choose a place where
I can wear my hat. I have sometimes thought of getting a wig to wear
in such places of vain resort. But to say the truth, a bad play will
often afford more rational entertainment for two or three hours than
an average dinner party, provided a man goes to it with an
understanding that such a thing can be neither better nor worse than a
shadow, and with an imagination to amend it. It is strange enough, for
your best modern plays and your modern acting of the best plays
(except in a very few instances) are so wretched that one should think
they could only bore and disgust one--meagre, vapid, false and vulgar
in the highest degree. One only wonders that so many human heads and
hearts can consent to sit it out, and be amused and refreshed by it. I
believe it is this very problem which gives the theory an interest to
me, for certainly the spectators are to me an integral part of the
spectacle (do I use 'integral' right? I could never properly
understand the calculus), and the most entertaining part of the action
is the action of the play upon the audience. You not only see the
mirror held up to Nature, but you see Nature looking at her image in
it, which presents her in still another aspect. Of the nature of the
multitude, their ways of thinking and feeling certainly, and partly
too of their ways of acting, much may be learned in the pit of a
theatre. From the effect of Bulwer's plays upon the play-going public
one might have inferred the effect of his novels upon the reading
public, almost as surely as you might have inferred the effect of his
plays from observing the style of acting which is most popular. But
besides my pleasure in contemplating the nature of the fool multitude,
I am curious about the laws of art, and I observe, in that as in other
things, that specimens of the want of the thing are as instructive as
the specimen of the thing itself. I never understood Shakespeare's
idea of Julius Caesar till I once saw George Bennett enact him; and I
think I gained more light as to the meaning of many parts of Falstaff
in the _Merry Wives_ from the grossest and, I think, worst piece of
acting I ever saw (by Bartley) than I have gained as to _Benedick_
from C. Kemble, or _Hamlet_ from Macready. Altogether, I find that the
clumsy, tawdry, motley pageant, with its little good and much bad,
its touches of nature here and there, and its scene after scene of
vulgarity, insipidity, cant, and monstrous unnaturalness, has the
effect of provoking my understanding and imagination into agreeable
exercise."

The time had come when, after six years of service, Spedding resolved to shake himself free from the uncongenial business of the Colonial Office, and devote himself to what was to be the work of his life. On the 19th of August 1841 he writes from Wycliffe Rectory to Thompson who was then in Germany:

You told me to write on speculation and not put off too long, but I
suppose I am not the less qualified to perform the former part of your
injunction for having neglected to perform the latter. But I suppose
the worst consequence will be that my letter will not reach you, by
which you will save something in postage and lose nothing in any other
way. The fact is that your letter reached me during the last hours of
my official life, when between the duty of clearing my table, and
preparing for another and a better life (packing up, to wit), I had no
time to write anything that was to go as far as Dresden. From the
business of Downing St. I relapsed suddenly to the not less absorbing
recreations of the 12th August and the moors; and since we left the
grouse in quiet I have been on constant duty in looking at rocks and
rivers and whatever there is to be looked at in a country not barren
of natural attractions and the scene of one of Walter Scott's poems.
To-day I have been I do not know how many miles to see a handsome
modern house and fine estate on the banks of the Tees, and to enjoy
the most formidable of all mortal entertainments, a lunch of about 16
persons at a house you were never in before; all low voices and only
one of the family known to you by name. However the beef was good, and
silence is richer than speech. I am now returned, my skin is full of
tea and bread and butter, and the room is full of young women talking
about ghosts and singing Irish melodies. I have borrowed this sheet of
thin paper that you may have the less to pay, and I have set off in
this minute hand that I may have the more room to utter whatsoever
shall be given to me to utter in this house: what that may be I shall
not stay to conjecture, but proceed at once to the proof.

I need not describe to you the appearance of London or the manners of
the inhabitants in the galleries and institutions with which it
abounds, as you have had opportunities of learning better by the use
of your own eyes and ears as much about these as you wish to know.
Something I might say about the manners and morals of Downing Street
which would be new to you, that section of London society having been
rarely penetrated by travellers, and if penetrated still more rarely
escaped from without the loss of that peculiar faculty by virtue of
which man tells truth. But this also I shall at present spare you.
Downing Street already lies behind me, and I think it is St. Paul who
tells us that we should fix our eyes on what is before, and what, I
wonder, is before _me_? I see a fair array of years abounding in
capabilities and in leisure to cultivate them, and if I could follow
that precept of St. Paul's faithfully, and abstain from looking
backwards at an equally fair array of opportunities unimproved and
leisure run to waste, I should think the prospect a splendid one....
For these six years past I have been working for other men's purposes,
and cultivating my life for their use. Now I set up for myself; and
the question is this, of all things which most need to be done what am
I best able to do?... But I had forgotten that all this will be a
mystery to you who do not know what I have done to myself since I saw
you. You must know this that as soon as it was clear which way the
elections were going, I wrote to Stephen to say that I meant to leave
the C.O., not because the change of parties need make any difference
to me, but because my position had already yielded all the good I
could expect from it, and a change of administration formed a natural
period which it would not be desirable to let pass, the gain of the
salary being, in fact, to a person who could live without it, no
adequate compensation for the loss of time to a person who could use
it in other ways, etc. etc. Stephen thought me quite right, and
recommends me to persevere in my present intention of making
literature my business: so far at least as to make a fair experiment
of it: not doubting that, for a man who has enough to live upon, and
who has resolution enough to employ five or six hours every day in
reading or writing with some definite practical object, there is no
kind of life so eligible: and there is plenty of work to do. So on the
10th of August 1841 (which day I will trouble you, in the memoir of my
life which you will prefix to your edition of the fragments of my
great work which you will find among my papers at my untimely death,
to make for ever memorable) I took my leave of the Colonial Office and
recovered possession of my time and my hours at the moderate cost of
£150 per annum, and here I am with the responsibility: a German, I
suppose, would spell it with a capital R. And now what have you to
say? One thing I really think is promising. I set out with a definite
project, not too big or too remote: and if I had not involved myself
in a desire to make something of these Baconian letters, which I could
not so well do without more leisure and liberty to hunt down my game,
I should not have trusted myself to my own guidance with quite so free
a conscience. I have already made an entrance into the Lambeth Library
and satisfied myself that former editors are not to be trusted; and
that a great deal may probably be done by a man who unites two
important requisites which have not yet met in any of them, industry
and brains. Would you believe, for instance, that there is more than
one letter from Francis Bacon to his Mother, and vice versa, which
have never been included in any collection of his letters? And that
there are many letters between Antony Bacon and his mother relating to
the prospects and goings on of the two brothers between the ages of
twenty and thirty-five which no biographer of Francis appears to have
studied, probably none has ever seen? Mr. Maitland showed me a MS.
commonplace book containing a good many anecdotes about Bacon and the
people of that time (most of them published I believe in the
Apophthegms, etc.) interspersed with memoranda of all kinds, of which
he says he can find no account. I suspect it to be Dr. Rawley's
private memorandum book; a point which may easily be verified: and if
so it will no doubt contain many things which being laid alongside of
many other things will throw light upon various obscurities. That such
a MS. should be known to exist in the Lambeth Library, and that, after
some half-dozen editors have been over the ground in pursuit of
Baconiana, it should remain there without anything being known about
it, is it not a proof that in fact the ground has yet to be explored?
And if so who can say but that among the volumes upon volumes of
letters relating to these times which are still preserved in print or
in MS., matter may not be found out of which to construct an edition
of Bacon's letters that will read as easily and as clearly as a
novel. I am sure if it were done properly, it would be one of the most
valuable historical and probably the most valuable biographical works
that has been produced about these times. For there is hardly any
contemporary political question of interest which is not indirectly or
directly touched upon at one time or another, and which would not
therefore require elucidation.

The subject is pursued in the next letter written from Mirehouse ten days later to Thompson, who was still abroad.

I am quite sure that much remains to be done with regard to those
Baconian letters which I told you of, and I am sure too that without
leisure and liberty I at least could not fairly set about it. I have
been among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library and found that, though
there are probably not many letters of Bacon's which have not been
published, there is a wilderness of papers closely connected with them
which has never been properly explored. It is a field in which nobody
has been at work that had both industry and brains. For the present,
therefore, I look forward to this as my main business, in which if I
prosper, I shall know what to do when (Peel having lost that no
confidence in his opponents in which consists all the confidence he
has to rest upon himself) Lord John shall come in again and fortune
shall be again in a condition to be wooed; if I prosper not, I shall
still know what to do; though it will be different. But I am filling a
second letter with myself.

I am afraid you are not likely to see any people of the right sort,
such as you describe, at Munich; though I duly advertised them of your
street and lodging. Pollock has been circuiting as simple barrister,
and will shortly have to circuit again as Barrister revising. In the
between he comes here, and indeed I expect him this evening....
Douglas Heath had meant to join John, who has been tumbling up and
down the Alps under the guidance of some Geologist; an unsafe guide, I
should fancy, for what death so sweet to a Geologist as to knock out
his brains against a stone; or to be embedded in some liquid,
liquefying, or indurescent substance (such as snow or mud or lava) in
which a million of years hence some other Geologist may find him
embedded and so satisfy himself that a man was once there? He seems
to have had some fine rides on the backs of avalanches down fissures.
But Douglas was kept in London by business partly, and partly by the
illness of his mother and the uncertain health of his father, and does
not expect to get out of England this year. I hope he will contrive to
get hither in about a month. I am afraid there is no chance of your
finding a chink of time between your return to England and your
October term business in which you might pay us another visit. Your
first object ought to be to put yourself into the most convenient
place for being thoroughly cured, which implies the neighbourhood of a
thoroughly good Doctor: a luxury which we cannot offer you here. But I
hope that, now the year is mine all round to dispose of as I think
best, we shall be able some day to make our several times suit and our
several lines meet at Mirehouse, and run on together for a while. You
are very much approved of by everybody here.

Early in the year 1842, Spedding accompanied the first Lord Ashburton to the United States as Secretary to a commission, the object of which was to determine a boundary question which was successfully settled by the treaty of Washington. He writes to Thompson from Gosport on February 9, 1842:

Having heard that you think I might have written to you upon the
occasion by my breaking out in this new light, and partly concurring
in that sentiment, and finding myself as much at leisure for the rest
of the evening as if the destinies of no country, much less the
destinies of two, depended upon me, I sit down to shake mental hands
with you, and to wish you prosperity during my eclipse and setting
behind the Atlantic.

I will not trouble you with explanations concerning my inducement for
taking so considerable a step as this. You will easily understand that
I had to listen to more inward voices than one, and to wait the result
of much confused inward debate before I decided to take it.
Fortunately there was no question as to the comparative worth of the
said two voices, nor any doubt as to the side on which they
respectively appeared. It was the Fiend, _i.e._ the baser nature, the
human instinct, that said, "Budge not." The better voice said, "Go,
why not?" The decision was soon taken, and being taken, the thing
itself seemed much easier than it looked at first. It is now above
three weeks since I have looked at it only as a thing that is to be,
and I almost feel as if it would be strange if it were otherwise. What
the effect of it may be on my character and fortunes I do not trouble
myself to prophesy. It will at least make me think many things easy
which seemed unapproachably difficult a month ago. It will teach me to
keep accounts. And it will give me some insight into the nature of a
state-conscience, a state-reason, a state-understanding, and a
state-character. Many things besides. It may very likely ruin my
reputation, but I am not sure that that would be an evil. I should be
much happier, I think, without any reputation, not to add that if it
were gone, I should be thrown upon my resources, which might after all
turn out to be a better thing. But let these things pass. One thing is
quite clear, that I could not spend the next six months in any way by
which I should gain so much either in knowledge or in power. My
immortal work must, of course, be suspended, but what is six months in
an immortality? By the way, touching my Falstaff Platonizing, I agree
with you, as reported by Merivale, that the insertion of such a joke
would be unbecoming in a Museum Academicum, the more's the pity, for
with the joke itself I was a good deal pleased. But then, on the other
hand, you will not let me prefix a serious introduction, explaining
the thing which it is meant to illustrate. I can only suggest that you
should yourself write an introduction _refuting_ the said theory, if
you really believe that the thing is worth putting in at all. But let
this also pass, for I see the bottom of my paper (by the way I suppose
I must not say such a thing in the U.S.), and the chambermaid would
fain be dismissed to her bed. At present you may truly say that I am
going ahead, for I alone of the suite have arrived, and my master, by
being unpunctual, has lost a day of fair wind.

At this time FitzGerald wrote to Laurence, the artist:

You have, of course, read the account of Spedding's forehead landing
in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for
Beachy Head. There is a Shakespeare cliff, and a Spedding cliff. Good
old fellow! I hope he'll come back safe and sound, forehead and all.
Not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it,
could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that
no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon's
virtue is so rarefied, that the common consciences of men cannot
endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea
of Spedding's forehead; we find it somehow or other in all things,
just peering out of all things; you see it in a milestone, Thackeray
says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont
Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva. We have great laughing
over this.

Tennyson's 1842 volume came out while Spedding was at Washington, and FitzGerald, writing to Pollock, regretted that it contained some pieces which he thought better omitted.

I agree with you quite about the skipping-rope, etc. But the bald men
of the Embassy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the
whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself,
was involved in that very Poem. Lord Bacon's honesty may, I am sure,
be found there.

"The Yankees," Donne writes to Bernard Barton, "seem to think baldness
a rarity appertaining to the old country, for their papers could not
sufficiently express their wonder, when Ld. Ashburton went over about
the Boundary question, at the lack of hair among his attachés.
Spedding's crown imperial of a cranium struck them like a view of
Teneriffe or Atlas."

"Nothing has been heard of Spedding," says FitzGerald, "but we all
conclude, from the nature of the case, that he has not been scalped."

The mission ended happily in the treaty of Washington, and Spedding returned to his friends, in spite of the forebodings of FitzGerald, who says:

A man on the coach the other day told me that all was being settled
very easily in America, but stage-coach politicians are not always to
be trusted.

By the end of the year (1842), Spedding was again at Mirehouse.

"I am at present," he writes to Thompson, "absorbed in teaching the
young idea of a water spaniel how to shoot. He promises to be an
accomplished dog. He can already catch a wounded hare and bring it,
rescue a snipe out of a rapid stream, hunt (though in vain) for a
water-hen among the roots of an alder-bush, and wait with intense
breathless anxiety to hear the sound of a duck's wing in the gloaming.
In time I hope to teach him to do as I bid him. We are all well here.
How is all at Cambridge? What shall you do at Christmas? If I am still
here, can you come so far north? You shall see the dog."

But although these country delights had their attractions for him, he had for some years established himself in London, where his rooms at 60 Lincoln's Inn Fields were the meeting-place of Tennyson, Thackeray, FitzGerald, and any of his friends who happened to be in London at the time.

"Spedding is just now furnishing chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields,"
FitzGerald writes in 1836, "so that we may look on him as a fixture in
London. He and I went to dine with Tennant at Blackheath last
Thursday: there we met Edgeworth, who has got a large house at Eltham,
and is lying in wait for pupils. I am afraid he will not find many. We
passed a very delightful evening."

His return from America after four months at Washington, led to his being selected by the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ to write an article on Dickens's _American Notes_, which gave the novelist strange and unreasonable offence. Spedding had originally written, "He is understood to have gone out as a kind of missionary in the cause of international copyright," and this had been changed by the editor to "He went out, if we are rightly informed, as a kind of missionary," etc. To this Dickens writes in a towering passion, "I deny it wholly. He is wrongly informed, and reports without enquiry, a piece of information which I could only characterise by using one of the shortest and strongest words in the language." And yet his letters show that, whether the subject of international copyright were the real object of his visit or not, his speeches on it are referred to with a kind of satisfaction as if they were of the utmost importance. Apparently he was dissatisfied with the impartial way in which Spedding distributed his praise and blame, praising only where praise was due and blaming where it was not, and not attributing too much value to the hasty results of a four months' experience of the country.

But for several years Spedding had been a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_, and the articles which he selected for republication are full of that calm wisdom which distinguished all that he wrote. In 1836 he reviewed his friend Henry Taylor's _Statesman_; in 1838 he wrote on "Negro Apprenticeship"; in 1839 on the "Suspension of the Jamaica Constitution"; in 1840 on the "Wakefield Theory of Colonization"; in 1841 on the "Civilization of Africa and the Niger Expedition," in which his friend John Allen lost a brother; and in 1842 on "South Australia in 1841," a sequel to the article on the "Wakefield Theory of Colonization." And now for the next thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the task of what FitzGerald called washing his blackamoor, "a Tragedy pathetic as Antigone or Iphigenia." His own special work was the arrangement of Bacon's letters and minor writings, which had hitherto been very carelessly edited, and for this purpose he spent his days among the originals in the Lambeth Library and the British Museum. "Spedding devotes his days to Lord Bacon in the British Museum," writes FitzGerald in 1844; and again in 1846, "I saw very little of Spedding in London, for he was out all day at State paper offices and Museums."

But he was not so absorbed in his special pursuits as not to take interest in public affairs, and the Maynooth Grant in 1845 and the opposition which it excited caused him to take part in an address to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in its favour.

"You will see in the _Morning Herald_ of to-day," he writes to
Thompson, "that the great event has already taken place, and though
the world continues to move as it did, there does appear to be a
change of weather.