Art. 14.-ALLENS, WEDGWOODS, AND DARWINS.

Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1792-1896. Edited by her daughter, Henrietta Litchfield. Two vols. London: Murray, 1915.

THE existence of this book is a powerful argument in favour of keeping old letters. Let us, however, distinguish. The letter-writing of clever people in days before railways and the penny post was a very different thing from the letter-writing of the present time, when haste and brevity are the soul of correspondence. The Allens, Wedgwoods, and Darwins, whose letters, collected by Mrs Wedgwood of Maer and carefully preserved by her daughter, the late Miss Elizabeth Wedgwood, who died at a great age in 1880, were people who took their correspondence seriously, and who discussed the affairs of themselves, their families and the world with proper deliberation, and yet with a brightness of outlook and a lightness of touch that are beyond praise. To read their correspondence between about 1792 and 1845 is to become intimately acquainted with a number of interesting people, and with their friends in the great world, and to obtain a number of new views about the history of the time and the opinions held by a singularly intelligent class of English society.

If Mrs Litchfield, Charles Darwin's daughter, had been content with arranging, editing and annotating only these early letters, she would have earned our gratitude, but she has done much more. The bulk of the second volume deals with her own immediate family, her illustrious father, her mother, who was Emma Wedgwood, and her distinguished brothers; their life in London and at Down in Kent; and the fourteen years of her mother's widowhood, a great part of which was spent at Cambridge. The interest of this last volume is not inferior to that of the first, though of course it is different. On the one hand it supplements the wellknown Life of Charles Darwin by showing us in some detail the domestic and truly human side of a great man of science; on the other, it paints a charming picture of Emma Darwin, the best of wives and mothers, and at the same time a woman of high intelligence and wide

cultivation, with definite views on politics and literature, and with the gift of expressing them in a clear and pointed style. In a word, she is revealed to us not only as the worthy helpmeet of Charles Darwin, and as the worthy mother of Sir George and Sir Francis, but as the true kinswoman of the many delightful ladies whose acquaintance we have been allowed to make and cultivate in the first volume.

The marriages of Allens, Wedgwoods and Darwins were decidedly complicated, so that the reader has no little difficulty in keeping the different individuals and their relationships clearly in his mind. Fortunately each volume provides a guide in the three pedigree tables which are prefixed; these, if he takes the necessary trouble of referring to them from time to time, will enable him to distinguish between the different Elizabeths (who are many), the different Carolines and Catherines, the different Toms and Johns, and to avoid confusing the three Josiah Wedgwoods, father, son, and grandson. This being premised, we may proceed to speak of the three families in order. The Allens appear to have been settled for some centuries in Pembrokeshire, and, since about 1730, to have owned the estate of Cresselly. At the time the book opens, the head of the family was John Bartlett Allen, who had fought in the Seven Years' War, and who in his old age appears to have retained something of the manners of a Prussian Grenadier. He was fortunate, however, in having a number of charming and clever daughters, with several of whom this book is intimately concerned. Of these, Elizabeth married Josiah Wedgwood (1792), second surviving son of the founder of the works at Etruria; Louisa married John Wedgwood, his elder brother; Catherine married the celebrated Sir James Mackintosh; Jessie married the historian Sismondi; and the youngest, Frances, always known as Fanny, remained unmarried, but has enriched the world with many of the best letters in this book, full of vivacity and good sense. Of these sisters, Elizabeth (Bessy) was the eldest, and whether as elder sister to Jessie and Frances, or as mother of her own large family, or as the centre of an interesting society, she is one of the most attractive characters in the book.

To her and the Wedgwoods we may return presently, but meanwhile some at least of her seven sisters claim a certain notice. We may pass over Harriet, unhappily married to a Mr Surtees, and Emma, who is not interesting except for her passionate affection for her eldest sister Bessy. Among the others, Louisa, who was reckoned the beauty of the family-she must have been beautiful indeed if she surpassed the original of Romney's picture -was happy, though not in a worldly sense fortunate, in her marriage with John Wedgwood, Josiah's brother; he was a partner in Davison's Bank, by the failure of which he lost his fortune, but he retained everybody's respect, and did many quiet public services, being among other things the founder of the Horticultural Society. Another sister, Caroline, married the Rev. Edward Drewe, who died young, leaving her with two daughters, who made interesting marriages. One became the wife of Lord Gifford; the other married Mr Alderson, a dis tinguished lawyer, afterwards a judge. Their daughter, in 1857, married Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards the famous Lord Salisbury.

The other three Allen sisters have a more personal interest. Catherine, commonly known as Kitty, waited till she was thirty-three, and then became, in 1798, the second wife of Mr Mackintosh, who a few years later was knighted and went to India as Recorder of Bombay, to return with his wife to England about 1810, and there to enter upon the life of literary and political activities and ambitions, of vigorous and often brilliant conversation, and unfortunately of financial confusion, in which he passed his remaining years. Mackintosh's life and character would be a fine study for the modern psychological novelist; he was so near to greatness and so near to happiness, and never achieved either. He was one of the first and ablest of the Edinburgh' reviewers; Charles Darwin thought him the best talker he had ever heard, better even than Carlyle or Macaulay; and he was freely spoken of as a probable member of Canning's Coalition Cabinet of 1827. His exclusion was the great disappointment of his later life. But there was a flaw in him somewhere. Many years before, Coleridge had written about him to Tom Wedgwood:

'I never doubted that he means to fulfil his engagements

with you; but he is one of those weak-moraled men with whom the meaning to do a thing means nothing. He promises with his whole Heart, but there is always a little speck of cold felt at the core that transubstantiates the whole resolve into a Lie, even in his own consciousness' (i, 249).

6

He adored his wife, the charming Kitty'; but, good and honest creature as she was, she could never quite return the affection. A year before his death and not long after Kitty had died, her sister Jessie Sismondi had written thus about him:

'I think of his life which I now look on as almost finished, with the greatest pity; not without blame, it is true, but it is almost lost in pity. He had an understanding to comprehend all the beauties of the high moral feelings and those of affection, but not the heart ever to feel them, so that he knew their heaven, sighed for it, yet, as if a curse was on him, could never put his foot into it. He loved passionately and fondly only one person (his wife) in the world, and she never could love him, though he was the only person in the world that truly loved her' (i, 248).

The writer of this letter occupies a larger part in the book than any of her sisters except Mrs Wedgwood and Fanny. Born in 1777, Jessie Allen was thirteen years younger than Bessy, twelve years younger than Catherine, and four years older than Fanny, and was therefore more like an elder sister than an aunt to Bessy Wedgwood's children. In the autumn of 1815, just after the Peace, she and her two younger sisters went to stay at Geneva, remaining there nearly three years; and it was there that she met and greatly impressed the historian Sismondi. He soon proposed, but she refused him; and it was not until after the return of the sisters to England, at the end of 1818, that she relented. The sisters and he had seen one another constantly at Geneva; and, before they left, he had renewed his offer (said Jessie) 'with an affection and a warmth of feeling that might have made me happy, if half a hundred other affections had not drawn me another way.' In point of fact, she was already forty-one; her brother John at Cresselly and her many sisters loved her, and, as she thought, filled her heart; and it was a dangerous experiment to leave England and her family and to marry a foreigner living

far away. But the family behaved very well, and put no difficulties in the way; and, though for a time after the marriage Jessie bitterly felt the separation from her old home, Sismondi's fine character and deep affection gradually conquered, and till his death in 1842 she enjoyed a much greater share of happiness than falls to the majority of mankind. Two years after the wedding we find her paying a short visit to her friends in England and returning with two sisters, Emma and the lively Fanny, to Chêne, the house near Geneva which the historian 'had been as busy as a bee to get in order'; a nice bright house with pretty wall-papers, plenty of books, white beds and comfortable furniture.

Still, for one reason or another-perhaps it was mainly an affair of health, for Jessie was more or less of an invalid for some years-it was a long time before she could quite feel the devotion to her husband which he had all along felt for her, though after his death in 1843 her sister Fanny wrote, 'she makes an idol of him; it is her nature to do so.' Life in the early days, alone with a husband who was always busy with his books threatened to become monotonous; but Madame Sismondi, who had to the full her family's taste for talk and society, started Thursday soirées, which were so successful that she had great difficulty in preventing them becoming crowded. Her rule was, so far as possible, to have men and women in equal numbers, not too many, all told, for general conversation, and not too many to be dealt with by the one parlourmaid, 'my poor little gentle Marcette.' Among the frequenters of these gatherings were certain survivors of Madame de Staël's circle, such as Mme de Candolle, wife of the famous botanist, and such men as Dumont, Bentham's disciple, Adolphe Pictet, and several others who were devoted to their 'affectionate and agreeable' hostess. With them came one lady of a certain celebrity, Mrs Marcet, whose little Conversations on Political Economy' were well known to our grandmothers; but, though she was natural and sensible, she was afflicted with a voice so loud that it made conversation impossible.

6

This life, varied by trips to England and by visits from her English relatives, proceeded evenly enough till 1843, when Sismondi died. Then Jessie, who was destined to live another ten years, came back to Wales, to be with