BOOKS.
MR. GRUNDY'S RECOLLECTIONS.* CONSIDERING that Mr. Grundy is not only unconnected profes- sionally with literature, but has been engaged to a large extent in out-of-doors labours, as an engineer, in various parts of Eng- land, as well as in Australia, we think that this book is entitled to a reasonable amount of commendation in a literary point of view. Mr. Grundy writes with no particular felicity or power, but he tells his story, or rather his collection of stories, clearly, and without oppressive surplusage of words ; and though we should have liked more grace and quietness—more absence of effort to be "smart "—it is better, perhaps, to have a little too much vivacity, than to suffer from the worse extreme of dulness.
His recollections embrace an interesting period of time, and a great variety of subjects. In boyhood, he saw the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, one of the first con- structed in England, and is able to give a photographically minute account of the circumstances under which, on that occa- sion, Mr. Huskisson lost his life. Mr. Grundy was closely associated with Stephenson in the toils and adventures of those stirring days, when landed proprietors were in arms against rail- ways, and when the men who came into a country district to survey the track of a proposed line "had to risk dogs and keepers, to get into this nobleman's park or that gentleman's estate by some ruse or other—often by night with lanterns, sometimes by means of an imaginary summons of the proprietor to distant duty." In marking out the lines, the bold pioneers were protected by no law. It was necessary to submit a chart of the track to the House of Commons before an Act could be obtained. "Some were actually committed as rogues and vagabonds, and sen- tenced to fine and imprisonment." The work was at times so pressing, that Mr. Grundy has sat up all night drawing plans, and been in the field at daybreak, to work till sunset, three days and nights on end, without sleep, except such as could be- snatched when he was being driven to or from his inn. His ex- haustion on one occasion was such that, when it became pos- sible to rest, he slept thirty-two hours without waking. "The faculty," he says, "have occasionally told me that this is im- possible. I only know that I did it." The pay was good. At twenty-one, Mr. Grundy was offered £20 a mile for "section work," of which he could do five miles per day. Six guineas per day of eight hours, with option to do two, or even three, days' work in the twenty-four hours, with double pay on Sunday,.
were more ordinary terms. It was about the time of the first railway mania that the " Plug " riots occurred. Mr. Grundy was in the midst of them, and states what he saw. The pro- ceedings of the rioters were simple. Marching along, a multi- tude too large to be resisted, they withdrew the plugs from boilers, letting the water run off, and raked out the fires. The factory having been thus brought to a stand-still, its hands joined the crowd, and they moved on to the next factory. The military were called out, and Mr. Grundy was the compelled witness of a successful attack made by the rioters upon a party of thirty lancers, belonging to a crack regiment. With a unity of purpose remarkable in a mob, the crowd contrived an ambush. on a hill-side, and prepared great heaps of stones to pour upon the soldiers. The latter had, escorted some prisoners to the railway station, and the attack was planned for their return..
Mr. Grund.y's account of what followed is a fair sample of what he can do as a describer :—
"After a long and anxious period of waiting, at last gaily and care- lessly came the soldiers, chattering one with another, their duty done,. and their accoutrements glittering in the sunshine. They slow into a walk as they breast Hobble Hill. Then a loud voice shouts, Now, lads, give it 'em!' From every wall rises a crowd of infuriated men, and down comes a shower of stones, bricks, boulders, like a close fall of bail. Great stones, hurled by a thousand strong hands, jostle. and split, diverging upon that small space where ride the lancers, in all the pomp of military pride. ' Gallop ! gallop l' comes the order, as their loader spurs his horse up the steep hill. But the men, jammed together, cannot gallop. They come down pell-msll, horses and riders. Those who can get through, ride off at speed after their 'officer, without thought for those behind. Indeed delay is death, or something like it. Down go horses and riders, rolling over each other, under that hell-shower. Then the command °time, Cease throwing.' Eight horsemen, bleeding and helpless, crawled, about the road, seeking shelter. Some lay still as death. Now and again a horse struggled to rise, and with a shrill scream fell back upon the ground. One man, said to be the crack man of his crack regiment, lay dead under his dead horse ; another • Pkturee of the Poet: Memorials of se,, I have Met, and Places I have Seen. By Francis IL Grundy, O.E. London: Griffith and Farnn. 1S79.
died in a few minutes ; and I believe that several were long in hospi- tal. Some ten or more horses were killed or disabled, the magistrate had his arm broken, and the only man of the thirty who escaped scatheless was the officer, Cornet Seel, who being leader when he gave the necessary order to gallop, escaped the shower of stones concen- trated upon the maim behind him. The road looked like a winter lane after a heavy hailstorm, when the deed was done."
We shall make room for another quotation, slightly con- densed, from Mr. Grundy, because it records an instance of singular coolness, concentration, and unselfishness, deeply tragic in its main interest, but with a trace in it of that grim humour which lurks in nature
Bill the Banker '—other name at inquest and funeral was not forthcoming—was only a poor navvy ; his usual post, at top of a form- ing embankment, amongst the ' tip ' waggons. At present—it was during the making of the Sowerby contract,' on the Manchester and Leeds Railway—he was 'top-man' over one of the shafts of one of the numerous tunnels being constructed on that lino. He pro- bably could neither read nor write. The shaft at which he was tip. man was perhaps 200 ft. deep, solid rock, sides and bottom. His duty was to raise the trucks filled below, and run them to the top, returning them empty to his mates at bottom. Now, when a chain broke away, or a big boulder fell off a truck, Bill had to shout, Waur oat !' and the miners below crept farther into their 'drives,' allowing the death-dealing article to come down harmlessly. One unhappy day, my top-man's foot slipped hopelessly, and he knew that he must be smashed from side to side of the narrow shaft, and landed, a crushed mass, at the bottom. But his mates P If he screamed, the unusual noise would bring them out at oneo to inquire the cause. He never lost presence of mind. Clearly went down the signal, Waur out below I' and his mates hoard the thud, thud, smash, of his mangled remains in safety."
This book contains some painfully interesting details respecting Patrick Branwell Bronte, the ill-starred brother of the author- esses of lane Eyre and Tfitthering Hight. Mr. Grundy assumes the tone of one who vindicates "a dear old friend" from cruel aspersion. Mrs. Gaskell has, it seems, "heaped most unnecessary scandal" upon Branwell Bronte, describing him, says Mr. Grundy, as a "social demon" or "domestic demon." We have taken the pains to look carefully through Mrs. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë, with a view to inspecting the refer- ences made to Branwell, and have met with no expression which is, we say, not equivalent to the term "domestic or social demon," but fitted. to convey the idea that she Would, under any circumstances, have applied such to Mr. Grundy's "old friend." The tone In which she invariably speaks of him is that of distress, using hardly a severe epithet, imputing his ruin to the influence of paternal indulgence and sisterly pride, in a household where he was the only son among a family of daughters. She does ample justice —more, we think, than ample justice—to his abilities, quoting a letter which he addressed to Wordsworth, giving a specimen of his verse, and dwelling upon his capacity for art. She states facts, no doubt, and could not, as the biographer of his sister, avoid stating facts, which prove him to have been an unspeak- able affliction to his father, whose life was imperilled in Bran-well's . midnight paroxysms of delirium tremens, and to his sisters, who listened trembling, hour after hour, in the consciousness that some frightful calamity might be taking place. She can- not help revealing that he was at last a moral maniac in re-
spect of instability of will ; but this expression is ours, not Mrs. Gaskell' s.
And what do we find, on turning to his indignant vindicator P We have a number of vague flourishes as to his having been" a genius of the highest order," but the examples given of his literary handi- work are so exceedingly poor, that they suggest very serious doubt whether he was a man of genius at all, and render it nearly certain that, if he had genius, it did not lie in the direction
of literature. We have said that Mr. Grundy is not a man of
letters ; his literary judgments are entitled to some indulgence ; but to any one with a tincture of critical faculty, a com- parison of what Mr. Grundy says he heard from Brontë with what Mr. Grundy sets before us as Pronto's literary performance, must seem ludicrously absurd. "He had a fund of information, experience, and anecdote, which he poured forth freely for my benefit." "He would discourse with wondrous knowledge upon subjects, moral, intellectual, philosophical." "The rich storehouse of his knowledge taught me much." These are Mr. Grundy's expressions. Unfortunately, every trace of this. Nile-flood of conversational genius has been obliterated from Mr. Grundy's mind. Stay,—not quite every trace. We are favoured with one sample of Broutil's discourse. Here it is : —" Fiat justitia, mat Clone that means, Justice must be done, though the heavens fall.' I beg your pardon, Sir, but I have been so much amongst the barbarians of the hills, that I forgot," &c. Since the rest of the wondrous knowledge, moral, intellectual, philosophical, imparted by Bramwell Bronte to Mr. Grundy, perished, no great loss would have taken place if this had perished also. It was bad enough to intro- duce in talk perhaps the very tritest quotation in the Latin language, but to introduce it with a translation and an apology was pompously dull. The verses quoted from Bronto by Mr. Grundy prove that he had some facility, not felicity, in versifi- cation; but neither they nor the verses given by Mrs. Gaskell exhibit thought, fancy, or feeling above the level of common- place. Mr. Grundy says that Leigh Hunt, Miss Martineau, and others "spoke in high terms" of a poem of Pronto's on Nelson. We should. like to know exactly what they said. Miss Mar- tineau was not one who would have praised bad verses out of politeness, but what immorality there was in Leigh Hunt's beautiful nature took the form of excessive soft-heartedness. The prose which Mr. Grundy quotes from his friend is not so bad as the poetry. Bronte's letters are clear and unaffected enough, but no one would ever have thought of reading them over twice, if they had not been written by the brother of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.
It is against the ascription to Branwell Brontë of the char- acter of a demon that Mr. Grundy chiefly protests, and. the least we have a right to expect from him is a moral vindication of his friend. What do we get P Brontë, he tells us, was "as great a scamp as could be desired." In mere perverse imitation of De Quincey, "he positively began the practice of opium- eating." He was given to drink. When employed at a place called Luddendenfoot, as station-master, he used to be absent, for days together, drinking with coarse men. "He had a porter to whom he left all the work, and the result was that very serious defalcations were discovered, and the inquiry which suc- ceeded brought out everything. Bronte was not suspected. of the theft himself, but was convicted of constant and culpable carelessness." These words are Mr. Grundy's. That they are not too severe is proved by the terms in which Drente himself refers to "the year passed at Luddendenfoot." "I would rather,' he says, "give my hand, than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, the malignant, yet cold debauchery, the determi- nation to find how far mind could carry body without both being chucked into hell, which too often marked my conduct when there." In addition to these astounding particulars, which transcend, in the suggestion of depravity, anything mentioned by Mrs. Gaskell, this strangest of vindicators gives lie —again in the words of his "dear old friend "—a con- fession of a highly equivocal kind, touching Bronte's relations with the wife of the man in whose household he served, for the last time, as private tutor. " Thie lady," writes Bronto, "(though her husband detested me) showed. me a degree of kindness which, when I was deeply grieved one day at her husband's conduct, ripened into de- clarations of more than ordinary feeling. My admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my knowledge of her un- selfish sincerity, her sweet temper, and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where most should have been given, . . . . although she is seventeen years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led to reciproca- tions which I had little looked for. During nearly three years 1 had daily 'troubled pleasure, soon chastised with fear.'" His employer, on discovering the state of affairs, forbad him the house ; and dying soon after, made it a condition of his wife's. sharing in his property, and thus escaping "ruin," that she should not see Bronto. In short, Bronte's conduct in this situation seems to have been not much better than, by his own account, it had been at Luddendenfoot. Mr. Grundy tells us that Bronte declaredhimself the author, in part at least, of Wuthering Heights- The statement merely adds one to the long list of poor Bronte's moral aberrations, for that he was capable of designing the book, or of writing ten pages of it, is absolutely 'incredible. He may have had genius, or something like genius, for painting, but he- had no literary talent worth mention.
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