REMINISCENCES OF A GENTLEWOMAN.* THE most trivial events borrow charm

when seen through the mist of bygone days. Our grandparents ate, drank, and died, wore clothes, travelled in post-chaises or on pillion,—in fact, did much as we do, post-chaises and pillions excepted, and were in reality just as interesting or uninteresting as their grandchildren who trouble their heads little over such ordinary affairs of life. What is it that invests these commonplace events with so much interest when they have happened a century ago P Human nature has not greatly changed since then. We may be a little brisker, and not quite so sentimental ; we may be a little more learned, and certainly not so content with ourselves and our sur- roundings. Perhaps it is an unconscious protest against the insipidity of ordinary existence. Every-day life must mean more, and produce more effect, than appears. Surely, if we could find the secret, all these necessary but unexciting events would possess the same interest to us as they did to those who thought it worth while to describe them. "Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry;" so we eagerly scan the commonplace histories of the commonplace people of the past, and try to find in a bird's-eye view what we fail to grasp in the details of our own daily life. Or perhaps it is nothing nobler in us than the love of gossip, which will not bear much scrutiny, but which all the same has a tap-root in most natures of an intelligent and sympathetic order.

It would, however, be unfair to class Miss Hutton's Reminiscences among the altogether commonplace. She had the advantage of living in times which have helped to make history. The Church and State Riots which disgraced the end of the last century, are to us little more than a name. We who live in peaceful times, with only the far-off murmur of socialistic agitation, can form little idea of the terror that these riots caused our ancestors. The Anarchist plots of to-day scare us from their mystery and suddenness ; but a large and angry mob, marching down upon a peaceful suburb, intent upon fire and pillage, is an altogether different experience. The mob which is mollified to-day, may be followed a few hours later by fresh hordes which cannot be reasoned with or turned aside. If a corporation has no soul, a mob has more often no brain and no heart. A word may appease it, or a word may set on flame its latent brutalities ; no reckoning can be sure, no course entirely prudent.

In a long and interesting letter, Miss Hutton gives a graphic description of the burning of her two homes,—one in Birming- ham, and one a few miles from the town. Within a few hours,

* Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century: Letters of Catherine Hutton. Edited by her Cousin, Mrs. Catherine Hatton Beale. Birmingham : Cornish Brothers. the outcome of years of toil and loving care was scattered to the winds. "The mischief," Miss Hutton writes, "was now

completed, and we encouraged each other to bear it. I had lost all I had collected, all that I had possessed ; but I looked round me and saw my father, mother, and brother, and I was rich." Driven from pillar to post, they could find no one willing to bear the odium and possible risk of harbouring the victims of the persecution. Inn after inn refused to take them in. Their own servants turned against them, and would have betrayed them to the furious mob which gathered along the roads intent upon destruction. Like fugitives, they wandered on foot in by-lanes and secluded paths. When, at last, one house afforded them a grudging refuge, a band of marauders approached the dwelling. It was a supreme moment, for their faithless and drunken coachman was there before them, and he had to be quieted or quelled, lest he should have betrayed their whereabouts. Miss Hutton and her mother sat cowering in an upper chamber :—

" With much difficulty," she writes, "I got our coachman into our room, which looked upon the road; the windows were open on account of the heat, and the curtains were drawn over them. I locked the door, and put the key in my pocket. The rioters are coming,' I said to the man ; sit down there, and do not speak.'—' No,' replied he ; I'll go down and speak to them ; they none of them know me.'—' If they do not know you,' said they may know your livery; you shall not move.' I made him sit down on the bed-side, placed myself by him, grasped his arm, and answered not a word to all he muttered. My mother, who sat at the bed's head, was equally silent. We heard the waggons draw near, they halted under our windows ; and never did such language, such oaths and imprecations assail my ears as I heard from the wretches who accompanied them. They entered the house, and I heard them swear that they believed some Pres- byterian was in it, and they would either burn it or pull it down. I expected every moment we should be betrayed, either by the people of the inn or my prisoner,,and I was prepared for the

event Fortunately my father had left us, for he would certainly have discovered himself. Two hours we remained speech- less and immovable. At the end of this time, eight of the rioters went back to Birmingham, and two went on with the waggons."

How strange it is to look back on the cause of such acts ! "For King and Church !" was the popular motto then. We have other causes for riot now, and other weapons whereby

the end might be attained. Socialism and dynamite take the place of Kings and pitchforks.

The disastrous effects of such trials soon made themselves felt. Miss Hutton lost her mother, who never completely recovered the shock, and the entire care of her now ageing father fell to her share. She undertook it with ungrudging love and devotion, and from this time travelled much, coming across many of the interesting persons of the day. A some- what voluminous writer, her correspondence included many in- teresting letters from various sources. As an old woman, she collected autographs, and even had the courage to beg one from Napoleon III., then Prince Louis Napoleon. The handwriting, we are told, was very small, but the short note accompanying the autograph was gracious and friendly. There are also numerous letters from Charles Dickens, Sir E.

Bulwer Lytton, Count d'Este, and Eliza Cook among her manuscripts ; and yet, in spite of these many advant- ages, one can hardly call Miss Hutton a very interesting writer. It is curious to note how entirely she was free from any self-questioning or arri6re-pensge. She had none of the introspection which, while it adds so much to the torment of some lives, certainly provides entertainment for the readers of biographies. Can any two souls be more completely different than Catherine Hutton and Marie Bash-

kirtseff ? Catherine Hutton passed her time in ladylike, or perhaps we might more generously say, in womanly con- tributions to literature. The Memoirs of her Father went beyond this, but the subject-matter may claim more than half the credit ; and there was a History of the Queens of

England, Consort and Regnant, never published, by which, her editor says, " the world would have been mach interested, and the writer's literary reputation considerably enhanced." Any- how, she commands a respect which all the wailings of Marie Bashkirtseff fail to gain. But she was essentially a woman of a past generation. The idea of a mission or particular vocation was entirely absent. In her eighty-ninth year, she writes a very carious record of her life and occupations, from which we quote. It at least sets forth her own view of what a useful life should consist in :—

" I have made shirts for my father and brother, and all sorts of wearing apparel for myself, with the exception of shoes, stockings, and gloves. I have made furniture for beds, with window-curtains

and chair and sofa covers. I have quilted counterpanes and chest covers in fine white linen, in various patterns of my own inven- tion. I have made patch-work beyond calculation, from seven

years old to eighty-five I have made pastry and confec-

tionery as habitual employments I have been a collector of costumes from eleven years of age, and I have now 650 English figures and 782 foreign. These are all whole-lengths, generally prints ; but some of the ancient ones are drawings from Strutt, by my cousin Samuel Hutton. The whole have been cut by myself without the mistake of a hair's-breadth ; and if the engravings

were old or bad, I coloured them They composed eight large folio volumes. But this is not all. To each volume I have written an index; and to each figure the date and name of the artist. More than this, I have writt-n on each opposite page of the English figures, explanations and remarks of my own, which constitute a history of the habits of this country. I consider this

as the greatest of my works I have walked much, and danced whenever I had an opportunity. I have ridden much on a side-saddle, and on a pillion behind a servant. I have ridden into Cumberland, Yorkshire, and the extremity of North and South Wales. I have ridden for six months on a handsome donkey—that is, daily, not during the whole time—and I have ridden in every sort of vehicle, except a waggon, a cart, and an omnibus. I have have been in thirty-nine of the counties of England and Wales, twenty-six times at London, twenty-one at watering-places on the coast, and five inland. Is it enough? It is. I sit in my chair at the age of eighty-nine years and a half, and look back with astonishment on the occupations of my long life. But the solution is easy. I never was one moment unem- ployed when it was possible to be doing something."

It is indeed enough—more than enough; perhaps—in its quaint, quiet conceit and prosaic egotism ; but it brought happi-

ness to her who wrote this. And, added to these household gifts, we should not omit that Miss Hutton says, in the same letter, that she had written nine volumes published by Messrs. Longmans and Co., and sixty papers in different periodicals, copied 333 songs ; and from three years old to eighty "read innumerable English books and many French," of which she "understood everything and remembered much."

To be fair to Miss Hutton, she could be racy as well as egotistic ; and we must quote a really charming criticism of a neighbour. Writing to her father from Scarborough, she says :—

"The air of Scarborough has overset a portion of Mrs. R—'s heavenly-mindedness. Not that she has ever been absent from a sermon or prayer-meeting, CalvinisticaL Baptistical, or Metho- distical ; not that she has bathed on a Sunday, or walked, except to chapel ; but the prince of this world has set some traps for her, in the shape of flaxen curls and lace caps, which she has not been able to shun ; and he laid a stumbling-block in her way, in the form of a bonnet of three guineas price, which she has had great difficulty to get over. But if righteousness overmuch be a fault, it must be a fault on the right side, particularly if it steers clear, as that of Mrs. 13,— does, of all uncharitableness."

There is one point curious to note, that throughout her well- spent life there is no sign that Miss Hutton took much interest in religion. Perhaps this is natural, from the creed she held. She was a Nonconformist of a quiet, unaggressive type, and her intellect was not of that kind which goes deeply into such questions. She had no passion, and apparently little spiritual side to her nature. Love, too, seems to have hardly touched her at all. Offers of marriage came even late in life, but they do not appear to have caused her any regrets or disquietude.

She was eminently a practical woman, and did not trouble her head about the "might have beens." Her friendships were numerous, but by no means engrossing. They served as an occasion for correspondence, which in those days was a serious art; but though she reckoned men as well as women among her friends, her attitude towards both was exactly the same- There is not a trace of coquetry in her nature,—consequently, we regret to say, there is little or no fascination ; but the Reminiscences are so full of detail, and Miss Hutton's character is so completely of the eighteenth-century type, that lovers of that period will read them with much pleasure. But they have no glow, and there is little real wit or humour. Middle- class comfort and middle-class conceptions of life pervade it all. There is culture, but it is the culture of well-to-do persons contented in their own well-doing. Her mind was of a local type, though her talents and abilities somewhat enlarged the sphere of her interests. The type is passing away, though it may still linger in certain parts of England.

But it would be difficult to find her counterpart in these days. And it is this which gives her memoirs their principal interest.