A VARIED LIFE,
Mn. (31IiIIPNEY8 has been entrusted with a good subject and has handled it well. He bad ample material in the "Retro. spect " which Mrs. Drummond was persuaded at the end of her life to write for the benefit of her children and grand- children. But an autobiography of this kind necessarily requires a good deal of explanation. What was so clear to the writer of it may not be equally clear to the readers even of her own family, and in Mrs. Drummond's case occasions of confusion were specially numerous. To name only one of them, she constantly refers to " father " and " mother," and again to " papa " and " mamma." But these titles stand not for two people, as the reader might suppose, but for four. This is only one instance of a complicated series of family relation. ships, and but for Mr. Champneys's notes and for the short "Memoir" which he has prefixed to the selections from the "Retrospect" the reader would often be in a difficulty.
Adelaide Drummond was the eldest child of Thomas Lister, second Baron Ribblesdale, and was born in 1827. Her father died when she was five years old, and in 1835 her mother married Lord John Russell, by whom she had three daughters. She died three years later, and Lord John Russell then took charge of the Lister children, and after his second marriage to Lady Fanny Elliot in 1841 this arrangement was con- tinued :— "The three families—groups of children—the Listen, the children of Lord John by his first, and those by his second wife— were brought up as one family. So completely were they united that to Lady Agatha Russell [the youngest child of Lord John's second marriage] it was a constant puzzle in her childhood why some of her sisters had a surname different from her own."
Lord John Russell proved a model stepfather both before and after his second marriage. He took Adelaide Lister with him on a winter visit to Bowood, and the whole house party came to see a performance of Ambition in her toy theatre, with shells representing the characters of the drama, while the author herself described the incidents. "The performance might really have ended tragically, for Lord Lansdowne's chair being too slight for his weight, collapsed and he fell to the ground. Lady Lanadowne's tears and anxiety impressed use very much, but as no harm had ensued I was told to go on, and everybody was very good-natured about my play." Then came two delightful summers at Endsleigb, where Lord John used to read aloud after dinner, and Adelaide was allowed to sit up long enough to hear him. The Minto connexion gave the children a London playground in the Admiralty dining. room. There the favourite game was the " ghost " game; the haunted house being represented by the dining-room table, on which the owners went to bed at four in the afternoon, while the ghosts walked solemnly round and at intervals imitated the striking of a clock. "As the hours advanced the ghosts became more demonstrative and the company in bed more terror-strioken," until as the human clock tolled twelve the ghosts jumped on the table and the screams that followed • Adelaide Drummond: lietreeoeot and Memoir. By used Chem pneys. London: Swede, Elder. and Co. [1.0s. ea. rod.] usually brought in the butler. In the years immediately before her marriage Adelaide saw many well-known men, but not their wives. "Distinguished poets, musicians, writers, Ac., were asked to the houses of those who then formed Society with a big S," but the recognition went no further than the husbands. The stay of the Russells at Edinburgh brought Macaulay and Jeffrey to their hotel. The former was Member for the city, and Adelaide records how much she was struck by "the democratic touch given by the waiters, who always announced ' Macaulay ' ! without a prefix." Of Jeffrey's conversation she recalls nothing, "except that he amused mamma and me by his frequent allusions to the possible necessity of ' opening the ports' "—a misuse of the vowel which she never heard from any of his contemporaries. As a child she knew Henry Taylor, and was even included in one of his recitations :— " I lay on the sofa permeating Desdomona while he declaimed Othello's speech before the murder. The smothering with the sofa pillow was a climax which I bore indifferently well. Some- times in the course of his declamation Mr. Taylor, I imagine, kept too close to the text, for Aunt Edward would occasionally shake her head and say reprovingly Mr. Taylor, Mr. Taylor."
Samuel Rogers—" Old Rogers "—was another celebrity of whom she saw a good deal, and in an aspect rather unlike that which he ordinarily wore. Once he repeated to her "slowly and with infinite pathos" Mrs. Barbauid's lines to Life, and another time he told her and "a few young and eager listeners" a long ghost story.
She saw a good deal of Queen Victoria, beginning with a visit in 1838, when the Queen was dressing for a drawing-room, and "sat on a large old-fashioned sofa, putting on her white silk stockings," with her "whole face lit up with smiles and laughter." Adelaide and her sisters were sometimes asked to call et the palace in their morning walks. The Queen "was always very easily amused, and her laughter was always very hearty, silvery, and infectious. She was delighted with any little funny remarks the children made. On one of our visits just after the coronation my sister Bossy said to her: 'How did you like your crowning P" Very much,' she said, and laughed again and again." On another occasion, just before the birth of Edward VII., a still younger sister, who could not speak quite plain, "was so struck by the appearance of the Queen that she exclaimed in a loud, clear voice: 'Oh, what a jolly fat Been.' The Queen laughed long and heartily." The formal presentation came in 1845, the chief incident that she remembers being the Duke of Cambridge'■ quite audible explanation when her name was called out : " Ah. Miss Lister, d—d pretty girl!" In the following year she wont with Lord and Lady John Russell to dine and sleep at Windsor I did not see the Queen very well during dinner, but the evening made up for that. In the drawing-room we sat in a rather stiff circle for a little while: then the Queen, turning to mamma, asked her whether I was fond of dancing. 'Indeed she is,' said mamma. The piper was called in; and the Queen, a lady in waiting, and I steed up for a threesome reel. She danced beautifully and as if she thoroughly enjoyed it."
In 1847 Adelaide Lister married Mr. Maurice Drummond, then a clerk in the Treasury, and afterwards private secretary to Sir George Cornwall Lewis, to Disraeli (for a few days), and then to Lord Derby. In the end, but not till they had been married more than ten years, both husband and wife were drawn into journalism. Drummond had time on his hands, and his wife was always glad to get any fresh outlet for her powers of observation. By this time they were living at Hampstead, where they bad for a neighbour Mr. George Smith, then the proprietor of the Pall Mall Gazette. By him they were intro- duced to the editor, Frederick Greenwood, who discovered that Maurice Drummond had a special gift for writing "Occasional Notes." To supply material for these a vast number of news. papers had to be examined, and in this part of the work Mrs. Drummond's knowledge of foreign languages was found very useful. What was begun for her husband's purpose proved equally useful for her own, and she became a contributor not only to the Pall Mall Gazette but also to several other journals. In one instance at least an interchange of matter between one paper and another was quickly effected. A large parcel of novels was once sent to her from the Pall Mali Gazette, only to be recalled two or three days later by a request for their return, as they had been intended for another contributor. " Having made up the parcel again, I took it into the hall, where I found a very smallboy who, looking at me with a benevolent and deoidedlypatronizing expression,said'Don't be downhearted about this ; they're sere to send you some more very soon."' But Mrs. Drummond had a better consolation than this. The reviews were already written, and were promptly sent off to a different paper. Another feature of this part of her life was the growth of a literary circle at Hampstead. George Smith had a large house and garden there at which Greenwood, Du Manner, Appleton, the first editor of the Academy, and others were frequent visitors. Mrs. Drummond complains that "the men who were producing much of the current literature of the day said very little about it." She clearly realized that though "talking shop" has a bad name, it is sometimes the moat attractive material of conversation.
These recollections make no reference to the stages in Mrs. Drummnnd'e religious history. But Mr. Champneys has given a sufficient account of them in the introductory Memoir. The Church of England as she knew it in her youth never had much hold on her, and when after a period of agnosticism, followed by some years' membership of the Salvation Army, she sought a more historical and institutional form of belief. she found it in the Roman Catholic Church. To the last, however, she spoke of the Salvationists with sympathy and affection. They were less Protestant, she thought, than "any other non-Catholic body," and in one of her letters she writes "I could give yen dozens of the short choruses they sing on their knees morning, noon, and night which could hardly be distinguished from our short indulgenced prayers."
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