Читать книгу Memoirs of Eighty Years - Thomas Gordon Hake - Страница 24

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I had taken leave of boyhood and entered on the period of youth—a time when neither children nor men were found to be suitable companions. The three epochs in our lives are pretty equally divided: that of childhood, owing to the feebler action of the forces, appears to pass away very slowly, and ending at our fifteenth or sixteenth year seems interminable; longer than the time it takes to advance from forty to seventy years of age, and quite as long as to go onwards from fifteen to forty years.

Of course there is an earlier and a later youth, and it is to the first that the preceding remark chiefly applies, the period when ignorance is not strange.

At this early time we do not recognize nature otherwise than as being ourselves, or in any way apart from us; it is later that the line of demarkation draws itself between the inner and outer world; and it is then that time seems to move.

I suppose it was owing to a species of honesty, but I found, very tryingly, at this time, that my self-assurance and my knowledge were in strict proportion; I was not, in fact, presumptuous; but of great modesty.

I must put to my credit a habit of not allowing a moment of ignorance to pass by without rectifying it by questioning either books or persons, and I often learnt more from others than from books. To this day I never come across a man possessed of special experience without questioning him as if I were engaged in a research. Not long ago, a gentleman who had been twenty years in the Fiji Islands, said of me that I had extracted more information from him respecting the people and country in an hour’s conversation, than had been elicited from him by all his friends put together, during the year he had spent in London as commissioner from the islands during the Colonial Exhibition.

I trace the increase of this habit upon me to the practice of minute diagnosis which belongs to the physician. By its means, at all events, I accumulated corners of knowledge, which few appeared to possess besides myself.

In a country town there is often a man or two of eminent attainments who is buried alive. It was so at Lewes, a feeble, antiquated presentiment of civilization in itself; but it contained Gideon Mantell, the great geologist, who, searching Tilgate Forest, became the discoverer of the Iguanodon, which is now visible in the South Kensington Museum.

In those days all county towns were alike in essentials, and Lewes was not a bad typical example. With a small population it returned two members to Parliament, both baronets, both wearing pigtails, both having parks within a drive. There was Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, and Sir George Shiffner of Combe Place. Great men were greater in those days than they are now, or will ever be again. Sir John looked a great man. Sir George looked only an important one.

Sir John was tall, slim, upright, with the look of a diagnostic, in whose presence a horse resolved itself into its elements. The whip in his hand told the man. When either of these worthies appeared in the quiet streets—and quiet they were, except on market days—the shop-keepers were seen standing at their doors as if they were their own customers. The apparition of Sir John or Sir George was like that of Hermes, when, formerly, the god visited Athens.

Like everything else that is worn out, Lewes was discontented with its lot. Not many miles south was Seaford, a rotten borough, and, in the distance, Old Sarum, and this was more than the less prosperous inhabitants of Lewes could endure. They must have reform, and it came.

Like many individuals, they did not know when they were well off.

After having two baronets at their command, both with pigtails, they are no longer a parliamentary borough; even their ancient grammar school is turned into a commercial Academy, no longer a Plato at its head.

What need is there of eternal retribution when men are everlastingly punishing themselves?