THE STORY OF A LIFETIME.*
LADY PRIESTLEY has ample reason to consider that her reminiscences are worth recording, for as the daughter of Robert Chambers—author of The Vestiges of Creation, and member of the famous firm of publishers—she moved in the most interesting society of the Edinburgh of her girlhood; and as the wife of Sir William Priestley, a physician whose general breadth of outlook, no less than his medical skill, was the foundation of his knighthood and unopposed election to Parliament, the same fortune attended her in London. Perhaps the chief feeling left by reading her interesting recollections is one of somewhat unreasonable regret that she did not think, early in life, of keeping a full journal in which to record her impressions of the people she met. De Quincey and Thackeray were among the visitors at her father's house; Noel Paton, Dr. Simpson of chloroform fame, and Professor Aytoun were intimate friends of the family ; and later, in London, she frequently met Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and other members of a now famous coterie. But possibly owing to a mistrust of her powers of literary vignetting, the pictures she draws of them, while inevitably interesting, are sometimes almost provokingly meagre. This fact cannot, however, be fairly urged by way of criticism, for Lady Priestley is careful to explain that the book was originally intended merely as a collection of jottings for the amusement of her family and 'friends. De Quincey she remembers as living in constant fear of jis much-tried landladies, and rushing from her father's house on Sunday evenings to the sanctuary of Holyroocl in order to each there before twelve o'clock, at which hour he was liable to be arrested for debt. Dr. Simpson appears as a dreamy, ..unpractical, but eminently likeable man, with a passion for availing himself of every possible opportunity for testing the properties of his newly discovered chloroform. He even went
• TN Story of a Lifetime. By Lady Priestley. London: Kagan Paul. Trench. and Co. [12s. Ga, net.]
the length of experimenting on the persons of his b oat's family, and, Lady Priestley writes, "with some of the liquid simply poured on a handkerchief would have half-a-dozen of us lying about in various stages of sleep. Our mother feared nothing, and was only too delighted to sacrifice, if unavoidable, a daughter or two to science." A great part of the second half of the book is occupied With describing Low her husband became a disciple, friend, and helper of Pasteur, and in depict- ing the conditions which subsisted in the London hospitals before the indefatigable allegiance of Pasteur's followers broke down the barriers of ignorance and prejudice that blocked the path of the germ theory of disease. This part contributes no less than does the more anecdotal first half to the formation of an unpretentious and pleasant volume of reminiscences.
Previous page
