Eminent Victorians quotes

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it.

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it.

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian⁠—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it.

Undoubtedly, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning’s career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on undismayed.

It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.

His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of a bishop for the …

she was no longer interested in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess belief in the Atonement.

In the face of such enormities what could Keble do?

He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the critical moment, with a spirit more excitable …

“I was not prepared,” he said, “for people questioning, even in the abstract, the duty of fasting; I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they practised fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be acknowledged and thought it only undervalued.”

We live and learn, even though we have been to Germany.

Other tracts discussed the Holy Catholic Church, the Clergy, and the Liturgy. One treated of the question “whether a clergyman of the Church of England be now bound to have morning and evening prayers daily in his parish church?”

Here, whatever else there may be, there is certainly no trace of a desire to deceive. Could a state of mind, in fact, be revealed with more absolute transparency?

When Newman was a child he “wished that he could believe the Arabian Nights were true.” When he came to be a man, his wish seems to have been granted.

Tract No. 90 was officially condemned by the authorities at Oxford, and in the hubbub that followed, the contending parties closed their ranks; henceforward, any compromise between the friends and the enemies of the Movement was impossible.

and he could satisfy his most exorbitant ambitions in a profundity of self-abasement. And so now he vowed to Heaven that he would seek nothing—no, not by the lifting of a finger or the speaking of a word. But, if something came to him—?

He had vowed not to seek; he had not vowed not to take.

Might it not be his plain duty to take? Might it not be the will of God?

His pride did not allow him to inquire further; but one of his lady penitents, Miss Giberne, was less discreet. “Holy Father,” she suddenly said to the Pope in an audience one day, “why don’t you make Father Newman a bishop?”

Upon which the Holy Father looked much confused and took a great deal of snuff.

For the next five years Newman, unaided and ignored, struggled desperately, like a man in a bog, with the overmastering difficulties of his task.

Pius V, and, most serious of all, the orthodoxy of one of Newman’s own essays had appeared to be doubtful. He resigned, and in the anguish of his heart, determined never to write again. One of his friends asked him why he was publishing nothing.

“Hannibal’s elephants,” he replied, “never could learn the goose-step.”

Newman was now an old man—he was sixty-three years of age. What had he to look forward to? A few last years of insignificance and silence. What had he to look back upon? A long chronicle of wasted efforts, disappointed hopes, neglected possibilities, unappreciated powers.

“it is like listening to the voice of one from the dead.” And such voices, with their sepulchral echoes, are apt to be more dangerous than living ones; they attract too much attention; they must be silenced at all costs.

It was the meeting of the eagle and the dove; there was a hovering, a swoop, and then the quick beak and the relentless talons did their work.

Even before his accession to the Archbishopric, Manning had scented a peculiar peril in Newman’s Oxford scheme, and so soon as he came into power, he privately determined that the author of the Apologia should never be allowed to return to his old University.

If the Pope were indeed nothing more than a magnified Borough Councillor, we should hardly have heard so much of him.

It is not because he satisfies the reason, but because he astounds it, that men abase themselves before the Vicar of Christ.

And certainly the doctrine of Papal Infallibility presents to the reason a sufficiency of stumbling-blocks. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the following case arose. John XXII asserted in his bull “Cum inter nonnullos” that the doctrine of the poverty of Christ was heretical.

They secretly hankered, even at this late hour, after some form of constitutional government, and they knew that the last faint vestige of such a dream would vanish utterly with the declaration of the infallibility of the Pope.

It did not occur to them, apparently, that a constitutional Catholicism might be a contradiction in terms, and that the Catholic Church, without the absolute dominion of the Pope, might resemble the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

Pius IX himself was troubled by doubts. “Before I was Pope,” he observed, “I believed in Papal Infallibility, now I feel it.” As for Manning, his certainty was no less complete than his master’s.

Pius IX himself was troubled by doubts.

“Before I was Pope,” he observed, “I believed in Papal Infallibility, now I feel it.”

As for Manning, his certainty was no less complete than his master’s.

When the votes were examined, it was found that 533 were in favour of the proposed definition and two against it. Next day, war was declared between France and Germany, and a few weeks later the French troops were withdrawn from Rome.

Almost in the same moment, the successor of St. Peter had lost his Temporal Power, and gained Infallibility.

What the Council had done was merely to assent to a definition of the dogma of the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff which Pius IX had issued, proprio motu, a few days before.

and still the mitred Councillors sat on. The Pope himself began to grow impatient; for one thing, he declared, he was being ruined by the mere expense of lodging and keeping the multitude of his adherents.

“Questi infallibilisti mi faranno fallire,” said his Holiness.

At length it appeared that the Inopportunists were dragging out the proceedings in the hope of obtaining an indefinite postponement. Then the authorities began to act; a bishop was shouted down, and the closure was brought into operation.

His conversion had come as a great shock to Mr. Gladstone. Manning had breathed no word of its approach to his old and intimate friend, and when the news reached him, it seemed almost an act of personal injury.

“I felt,” Mr. Gladstone said, “as if Manning had murdered my mother by mistake.”

For twelve years the two men did not meet, after which they occasionally saw each other and renewed their correspondence. This was the condition of affairs when Mr. Gladstone published his pamphlet.

In all his letters, in all his papers, in all his biographical memoranda, not a word of allusion is to be found to the misfortune, nor to the death, of the most loyal of his adherents.

Monsignor Talbot’s name disappears suddenly and forever⁠—like a stone cast into the waters.

Manning was now an old man, and his outward form had assumed that appearance of austere asceticism which is, perhaps, the one thing immediately suggested by his name to the ordinary Englishman.

In private, however, the surviving Cardinal’s tone was apt to be more … direct.

“Poor Newman!” he once exclaimed in a moment of genial expansion. “Poor Newman! He was a great hater!”

Everyone knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale.

The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succour the afflicted;

The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile as fancy painted her. She worked in another fashion and towards another end; she moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination.

A demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest.

And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.

What was that secret voice in her ear, if it was not a call? Why had she felt, from her earliest years, those mysterious promptings towards … she hardly knew what, but certainly towards something very different from anything around her?

Why, as a child in the nursery, when her sister had shown a healthy pleasure in tearing her dolls to pieces, had she shown an almost morbid one in sewing them up again?

Why was she driven now to minister to the poor in their cottages, to watch by sickbeds, to put her dog’s wounded paw into elaborate splints as if it was a human being?

and that they have changed is due, far more than to any other human being, to Miss Nightingale herself. It is not to be wondered at that her parents should have shuddered at the notion of their daughter devoting her life to such an occupation.

“It was as if,” she herself said afterwards, “I had wanted to be a kitchen-maid.”

Yet the want, absurd and impracticable as it was, not only remained fixed immovably in her heart, but grew in intensity day by day. Her wretchedness deepened into a morbid melancholy.

A desirable young man? Dust and ashes! What was there desirable in such a thing as that?

“In my thirty-first year,” she noted in her diary, “I see nothing desirable but death.”

Three more years passed, and then at last the pressure of time told; her family seemed to realise that she was old enough and strong enough to have her way; and she became the superintendent of a charitable nursing home in Harley Street.

She had gained her independence, though it was in a meagre sphere enough; and her mother was still not quite resigned: surely Florence might at least spend the summer in the country. At times, indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept.

“We are ducks,” she said with tears in her eyes, “who have hatched a wild swan.” But the poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched, it was an eagle.

Apparently, it was the business of Miss Nightingale. She procured socks, boots, and shirts in enormous quantities; she had trousers made, she rigged up dressing-gowns.

“The fact is,” she told Sidney Herbert, “I am now clothing the British Army.”

All at once, word came from the Crimea that a great new contingent of sick and wounded might shortly be expected. Where were they to go? Every available inch in the wards was occupied; the affair was serious and pressing, and the authorities stood aghast.

“Oh, dear Miss Nightingale,” said one of her party as they were approaching Constantinople, “when we land, let there be no delays, let us get straight to nursing the poor fellows!”

“The strongest will be wanted at the washtub,” was Miss Nightingale’s answer.

And it was upon the washtub, and all that the washtub stood for, that she expended her greatest energies. Yet to say that, is perhaps to say too much.

Over and over again her untiring efforts rescued those whom the surgeons had abandoned as beyond the possibility of cure. Her mere presence brought with it a strange influence. A passionate idolatry spread among the men—they kissed her shadow as it passed. They did more.

“Before she came,” said a soldier, “there was cussin’ and swearin’ but after that it was as ’oly as a church.”

The most cherished privilege of the fighting man was abandoned for the sake of Miss Nightingale. In those “lowest sinks of human misery,” as she herself put it, she never heard the use of one expression “which could distress a gentlewoman.”

“I never heard her raise her voice,” said one of her companions. “Only when she had spoken, it seemed as if nothing could follow but obedience.” Once, when she had given some direction, a doctor ventured to remark that the thing could not be done.

“But it must be done,” said Miss Nightingale. A chance bystander, who heard the words, never forgot through all his life the irresistible authority of them. And they were spoken quietly⁠—very quietly indeed.

Late at night, when the long miles of beds lay wrapped in darkness, Miss Nightingale would sit at work in her little room, over her correspondence. It was one of the most formidable of all her duties.

And then her pen, in the virulence of its volubility, would rush on to the discussion of individuals, to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient nurse.

Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun.

Her nicknames were terrible. She respected no one: Lord Stratford, Lord Raglan, Lady Stratford, Dr. Andrew Smith, Dr. Hall, the Commissary-General, the Purveyor—she fulminated against them all. The intolerable futility of mankind obsessed her like a nightmare, and she gnashed her teeth against it.

The name of Florence Nightingale lives in the memory of the world by virtue of the lurid and heroic adventure of the Crimea.

Had she died—as she nearly did—upon her return to England, her reputation would hardly have been different;

No; she had work to do; and, come what might, she would do it. The doctors protested in vain; in vain her family lamented and entreated; in vain her friends pointed out to her the madness of such a course.

Madness? Mad⁠—possessed⁠—perhaps she was. A demoniac frenzy had seized upon her.

As she lay upon her sofa, gasping, she devoured blue-books, dictated letters, and, in the intervals of her palpitations, cracked her febrile jokes. For months at a stretch she never left her bed. For years she was in daily expectation of death.

Swept him—where to? Ah! Why had he ever known Miss Nightingale? If Lord Panmure was a bison, Sidney Herbert, no doubt, was a stag—a comely, gallant creature springing through the forest; but the forest is a dangerous place.

One has the image of those wide eyes fascinated suddenly by something feline, something strong; there is a pause; and then the tigress has her claws in the quivering haunches; and then⁠—!

Besides Sidney Herbert, she had other friends who, in a more restricted sphere, were hardly less essential to her.

When the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplaces of the moral judgment are better left unmade.

If Miss Nightingale had been less ruthless, Sidney Herbert would not have perished; but then, she would not have been Miss Nightingale. The force that created was the force that destroyed.

It was her Demon that was responsible. When the fatal news reached her, she was overcome by agony. In the revulsion of her feelings, she made a worship of the dead man’s memory;

For a moment, indeed, in the first agony of her disappointment, she had wildly clutched at a straw; she had written to M. Gladstone to beg him to take up the burden of Sidney Herbert’s work.

And Mr. Gladstone had replied with a sympathetic account of the funeral.

Succeeding Secretaries of State managed between them to undo a good deal of what had been accomplished, but they could not undo it all; and for ten years more (1862–72) Miss Nightingale remained a potent influence at the War Office.

Lying on her sofa in the little upper room in South Street, she combined the intense vitality of a dominating woman of the world with the mysterious and romantic quality of a myth.

She was a legend in her lifetime, and she knew it.

She tasted the joys of power, like those Eastern Emperors whose autocratic rule was based upon invisibility, with the mingled satisfactions of obscurity and fame.

“What beings should we then conceive that God would create?” Now, He cannot create perfect beings, “since, essentially, perfection is one”; if He did so, He would only be adding to Himself. Thus the conclusion is obvious: He must create imperfect ones.

Omnipotent Righteousness, faced by the intolerable impasse of a solitary existence, finds itself bound by the very nature of the cause, to create the hospitals at Scutari.

Whether this argument would have satisfied the artisans was never discovered, for only a very few copies of the book were printed for private circulation. One copy was sent to Mr. Mill, who acknowledged it in an extremely polite letter.

Miss Nightingale, however, with all her experience of public life, never stopped to consider the question whether God might not be a Limited Monarchy. Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox.

She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.

As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork.

Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.

As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork.

Then, suddenly, in the very midst of the ramifying generalities of her metaphysical disquisitions, there is an unexpected turn and the reader is plunged all at once into something particular, something personal, something impregnated with intense experience—a virulent invective upon the position of women in …

the acrimony of her nature asserted itself. She felt that she gave more sympathy than she received; she was exhausted, and she was annoyed by his conversation. Her tongue, one day, could not refrain from shooting out at him:

“He comes to me, and he talks to me,” she said, “as if I were someone else.”

asked the Aga Khan. She was a little taken aback, and said, “What do you mean by ‘improving’?” He replied, “Believing more in God.” She saw that he had a view of God which was different from hers.

“A most interesting man,” she noted after the interview; “but you could never teach him sanitation.”

When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited very patiently, played a queer trick on Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equalled by its acerbity.

Sir Douglas Dawson, after a short speech, stepped forward, and handed the insignia of the Order to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognised that some compliment was being paid her.

“Too kind⁠—too kind,” she murmured; and she was not ironical.

Keate was still reigning at Eton; and we possess, in the records of his pupils, a picture of the public school education of the early nineteenth century, in its most characteristic state.

It was a system of anarchy tempered by despotism.

Hundreds of boys, herded together in miscellaneous boardinghouses, or in that grim “Long Chamber” at whose name in after years aged statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived, badgered and overawed by the furious incursions of an irascible little old man carrying a bundle of …

… statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived, badgered and overawed by the furious incursions of an irascible little old man carrying a bundle of birch-twigs, a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse.

It was a life of freedom and terror, of prosody and rebellion, of interminable floggings and appalling practical jokes.

Keate ruled, unaided—for the undermasters were few and of no account—by sheer force of character. But there were times when even that indomitable will was overwhelmed by the flood of lawlessness. Every Sunday afternoon he attempted to read sermons to the whole school assembled;

He would apply to his scholars, as he himself explained to them in one of his sermons, “the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself.”

He would treat the boys at Rugby as Jehovah had treated the Chosen People: he would found a theocracy; and there should be judges in Israel.

For this purpose, the system, prevalent in most of the public schools of the day, by which the elder boys were deputed to keep order in the classrooms, lay ready to Dr. Arnold’s hand.

But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol and murdered him.”

Such were the alarming results of insufficient whipping.

Dr. Arnold did not apply this doctrine to the Praepostors, but the boys in the lower parts of the school felt its benefits, with a double force. The Sixth Form was not only excused from chastisement; it was given the right to chastise.

but in those days the prefectorial system—the system which hands over the life of a school to an oligarchy of a dozen youths of seventeen—was still in its infancy, and had not yet borne its fruit.

Teachers and prophets have strange after-histories; and that of Dr. Arnold has been no exception.

The earnest enthusiast who strove to make his pupils Christian gentlemen and who governed his school according to the principles of the Old Testament, has proved to be the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form.

he believed, indeed, that he had solved that problem, as a reference to some passages in the book which he was carrying would show.

This singular person was General Gordon, and his book was the Holy Bible.

In such complete retirement from the world and the ways of men, it might have seemed that a life of inordinate activity had found at last a longed-for, final peacefulness.

the supply followed the demand. Gordon, after years of labour, might here and there stop up a spring or divert a tributary, but, somehow or other the waters would reach the riverbed. In the end, he himself came to recognise this.

“When you have got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it,” he said, “then slavery will cease in these lands.”

And yet he struggled desperately on; it was not for him to murmur. “I feel my own weakness, and look to Him who is Almighty, and I leave the issue without inordinate care to Him.”

What was the Mahdi to stand up against him! A thousand schemes, a thousand possibilities sprang to life in his pullulating brain. A new intoxication carried him away.

“Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c’est l’unique question.”

Little though he knew it, Gordon was a disciple of Baudelaire. “Pour ne pas sentir l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.”

A new spirit, it was clear—a determined, an intractable spirit—had taken control of the Sudan situation. What was it? The explanation was simple, and it was ominous.

Mr. Gladstone had intervened.

The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his enormous career. He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy.

the man, too, whose sense of right and justice was invigorated and ennobled by an enthusiastic heart.

It was also easy to detest him as a hypocrite, to despise him as a demagogue, and to dread him as a crafty manipulator of men and things for the purposes of his own ambition.

It might have been supposed that one or other of these conflicting judgments must have been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross prejudice or wilful blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile such contradictory conceptions of a single human being.

The soft serpent coils harden into quick strength that has vanished, leaving only emptiness and perplexity behind. Speech was the fibre of his being; and, when he spoke, the ambiguity of ambiguity was revealed.

The long, winding, intricate sentences, with their vast burden of subtle and complicated qualifications, befogged the mind like clouds, and like clouds, too, dropped thunder bolts.

Could it not then at least be said of him with certainty that his was a complex character? But here also there was a contradiction.

But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only, with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater.

The flame shot out on every side, scorching and brilliant; but in the midst, there was a darkness.

That Mr. Gladstone’s motives and ambitions were not merely those of a hunter after popularity was never shown more clearly than in that part of his career which, more than any other, has been emphasised by his enemies—his conduct towards General Gordon.

Yet it must not be supposed that he was cynical; perhaps he was not quite great enough for that. He looked forward to a pleasant retirement—a country place—some literary recreations. He had been careful to keep up his classics.

His ambition can be stated in a single phrase⁠—it was to become an institution; and he achieved it.

No doubt, too, he deserved it. The greatest of poets, in a bitter mood, has described the characteristics of a certain class of persons, whom he did not like. “They,” he says,

In all he did, he was cautious, measured, unimpeachably correct. It would be difficult to think of a man more completely the antithesis of Gordon. His temperament, all in monochrome, touched in with cold blues and indecisive greys, was eminently unromantic.

He had a steely colourlessness, and a steely pliability, and a steely strength.

Endowed beyond most men with the capacity of foresight, he was endowed as very few men have ever been with that staying-power which makes the fruit of foresight attainable. His views were long, and his patience was even longer. He progressed imperceptibly; he constantly withdrew;

They loved him for his casualness—for his inexactness—for refusing to make life a cut-and-dried business—for ramming an official dispatch of high importance into his coat-pocket, and finding it there, still unopened, at Newmarket, several days later.

They loved him for his hatred of fine sentiments; they were delighted when they heard that at some function, on a florid speaker’s avowing that “this was the proudest moment of his life,” Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone “the proudest moment of my life was when my pig won the prize at Skipton Fair.”

Above all, they loved him for being dull. It was the greatest comfort—with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound.

… delighted when they heard that at some function, on a florid speaker’s avowing that “this was the proudest moment of his life,” Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone “the proudest moment of my life was when my pig won the prize at Skipton Fair.”

Above all, they loved him for being dull.

It was the greatest comfort—with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound.

They looked up, and took their fill of the sturdy, obvious presence.

The inheritor of a splendid dukedom might almost have passed for a farm hand.

Almost, but not quite. For an air that was difficult to explain, of preponderating authority, lurked in the solid figure; and the lordly breeding of the House of Cavendish was visible in the large, long, bearded, unimpressionable face.

Gladstone’s mysterious passions—was finally determined by the fact that Lord Hartington was slow. If he had been even a very little quicker—if he had been quicker by two days … but it could not be.

The ponderous machinery took so long to set itself in motion; the great wheels and levers, once started, revolved with such a laborious, such a painful deliberation, that at last their work was accomplished⁠—surely, firmly, completely, in the best English manner, and too late.

Seven stages may be discerned in the history of Lord Hartington’s influence upon the fate of General Gordon. At the end of the first stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon’s appointment to Khartoum.

One other characteristic—the necessary consequence, or, indeed, it might almost be said, the essential expression, of all the rest—completes the portrait:

Lord Hartington was slow.

He was slow in movement, slow in apprehension, slow in thought and the communication of thought, slow to decide, and slow to act. More than once this disposition exercised a profound effect upon his career. A private individual may, perhaps, be slow with impunity;

It was useless. On July 31st, Lord Hartington did the deed. He stated that, unless an expedition was sent, he would resign. It was, he said, “a question of personal honour and good faith, and I don’t see how I can yield upon it.”

His conscience had worked itself to rest at last.

When Mr. Gladstone read the words, he realised that the game was over. Lord Hartington’s position in the Liberal Party was second only to his own; he was the leader of the rich and powerful Whig aristocracy; his influence with the country was immense.

“I nearly,” he wrote to Lord Hartington, “but not quite, adopt words received today from Granville. ‘It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and does not choose to answer them.’ ”

Nearly, but not quite! The qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail.

This time, the sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On August 26th, Lord Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on September 9th, he arrived in Egypt.

This was sheer insubordination, no doubt; but he could not help that; it was not in his nature to be obedient.

“I know if I was chief, I would never employ myself, for I am incorrigible.”

Decidedly, he was not afraid to be “what club men call insubordinate, though, of all insubordinates, the club men are the worst.”

The splendid hawks that swooped about the palace reminded him of a text in the Bible: “The eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”

“I often wonder,” he wrote, “whether they are destined to pick my eyes, for I fear I was not the best of sons.”

So, sitting late into the night, he filled the empty telegraph forms with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living passion …

It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and shown their “black pug faces” in the palace looking-glasses. He watched with a cynical sympathy the impertinence of a turkey-cock that walked in his courtyard.

He made friends with a mouse who, “judging from her swelled-out appearance,” was a lady, and came and ate out of his plate.

The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands, and with their curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer’s translation.

He had given way to “outside influences”; the two Pashas had been “judicially murdered.” Again and again he referred to the incident with a haunting remorse. The Times, perhaps, would consider that he had been justified; but what did that matter?

“If the Times saw this in print, it would say, ‘Why, then, did you act as you did?’ to which I fear I have no answer.”

He determined to make what reparation he could, and to send the families of the unfortunate Pashas £1,000 each.

He trusted no one. Looking into the faces of those who surrounded him, he saw only the ill-dissimulated signs of treachery and dislike. Of the 40,000 inhabitants of Khartoum he calculated that two-thirds were willing—were perhaps anxious—to become the subjects of the Mahdi.

“These people are not worth any great sacrifice,” he bitterly observed.

The Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent; the soldiers were cowards. All his admiration was reserved for his enemies.

Of the 40,000 inhabitants of Khartoum he calculated that two-thirds were willing—were perhaps anxious—to become the subjects of the Mahdi. “These people are not worth any great sacrifice,” he bitterly observed. The Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent; the soldiers were cowards.

All his admiration was reserved for his enemies.

The meanest of the Mahdi’s followers was, he realised, “a determined warrior, who could undergo thirst and privation, who no more cared for pain or death than if he were stone.”