The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1877-05-29 00:00:00

HOW TO SPEND A HOLIDAY.

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A very handy little Pamphlet has been issued,
showing the summer excursions at the choice of the
holiday-maker, who has five weeks at his disposal for
a trip over the Grand Trunk of Canaihi, via, the
ma,milicent service of steamers,—the Allan Line. An
intwsluction entitled "to Niaonia" is written by the
Rev. A. W. Thorold, M. £, and his condensed
extract, if we may call it as of the pleasures attendant
ups, such a trip is as billows :
"Given three gao.l things —flve weeks of holiday, a
wholesome liking for salt water, and fifty pounils—man
you letter with them than go to Niagara
See what you will get by it, First you will
be lsiarilat and lodged in a ship of a steam-fleet,
beaten by nolle in the Atlantic for safety, comfort,
discipline, ant cheapness :1 mean Allan's Conadion Line.
You will hove at least twenty days (10 each way) of the
most pure Rllii invigorating air that human lungs can
inhale ; and quite sufficient to set up even a jailed
Londoner. You will have a varied, amusing, and by no
means unprofitable iimmrtunity, of studying human
nature among intim:roes fellow-passengers of all countries,
ages, and conditions. Yost will ascend the St. Lawrence,
which is one of the most stately and interesting rivers in
the world, You will pass through a district of Canada,
which will bring you into contact with its oldest civilisa-
tion, and its most recent industries, its noblest public
buildings, and the grandest memories of its early time.
You may shoot rapids, gaze on the outskirts of the
forest, see native Initians on railways, travel in gilded
saloons, which at night become lied rooms, or, if going by
water, in large steamers, seine of which may accurately
Ise described as floating palaces. Everywhere you will
hear your native tongue spoken, you will see your native
flag floating in the breeze ; you will be surprised, let us
hope, gratifies' , by a hearty loyalty; you will see a young
Empire, in all the flush and enthusiasm of increasing
greatness, governing itself with decision, and developing
its resources with such an amazing rapidity, that, as WM
once said quaintly of a Canadian spring, if you would only
put your head to the ground you woollii hear the grass
grow. Last, but not least you will see what, all visor life
afterwards, you will be glad to have seen, aut what, with
every returning summer, you will long once more to visit,
If but for one short afternoon—nature's most peerless,
most iniliscribable, most unapproachable, most sublime
marvel—Niagara Falls
My first impression of the St. Lawrence, so much more
beautiful than ever I expected it to be, quite convinced
me that this is the right way of entering North Aneerica ;
and, not the less so, bey:vise the voyage, front land to
land, is two days shorter than to New York.
For the grandeur of its site, and the exquisiteness, as
well as extent of the views from it, Quebec has but tow
rivals. The view from the Esplanade, looking down the
river towards Orleans, remind toe of the Bosphorus ; but
the noblest prospect is from the Citadel, north over the
City and the St. Charles River, you look away towards
far-off azure hills, clothed with primeval forest, and in all
variety of rolling or peaked outline—one in particular,
standing all b y itself, just like Mount Tabor. Then down
the river, with its ships and steamers, and smaller craft of
all kinds, and the white houses on the Island of Orleans,
and on the far horizon, blue with their indescribable blue,
a grand mountain range, the like of which we should
never see till we returned there again,"

THE LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Bagraria.—[Chatto and Winans, Piccadilly.) A
most interesting number is this. The new tale " By
Proxy" opens capitally aml promises the continuations
shall be of stirring and exciting interest. It is written
in a brisk and happy style, and its description of the
habits of the wearers of pig-tails and clump-feet are
extremely good. The illustrations are above the
average. There are also two other stork* running,
and several very readable papers. From that relating
to poor Tom ifood, the late editor of Fun, by Mr.
Escott, we make the following extracts, which we are
sure will be read with deep interest :
" Just ten years havetpaased since the last of a series
of little reunions of social and literary friends, held as
regularly as Friday came round, took place in the
house marked number eighteen of the street in which
I am now writing—South-street, Brompton. The
host and hostess of these occasions, and but too large
a proportion of the guests, have entered into the
eternal siknce. Tom Hood and his wife have gone ;
Morten, the artist, perished by an untimely death;
Find Gray, also an artist, was struck down by con- ,
siunption soon afterwards ,• W. J. Prowse succumbed
to the some malady at Niee; Tom Robertson, the
author of Society, lived only long enough to witness
the establishment of his fame and fortune. These
Friday evenings had their origin in the consultations
held over a periodical long since defunct—" Saturday
Night." They were honest, genial, and successful
attempts to re-produce a species of social gathering
which was even then obeolete, and upon a scale of
sincere, enjoyable, and modest hospitality, which in
1 an age of snobbish ostentation, when liohetnianisni
apes the airs of 'society even as wime society mimics
130hemianism, has become anachronism. Any Un—::
between ten and midnight the guests began to drop in,
The weekly holiday had begun for them, inaugurated
perhaps by a visit to the theatre, to which there suc-
ceed supper at Tom Hood's. For those who had not
gone to the play, there were chat and tobacco first.
Then came the meal itself—simple, wholesome, and
delectable. After supper there were more chat and
more tobacco, songs, and recitations. Mr. H. S.
Leigh was ever ready to oblige' with a melody,
whose words an,l music were his OWII. W. J. Prowse
having th,ne his journalistic work for the week, his
eyes sparkling with humour, his whole face lit up
with intelligence—a noticeable little man, upon whom
true genius had set its stamp—would fascinate all who
heard him with quaint, whimsical, witty talk, remind-
ing one of Charles Lamb, without Lamb's stutter;
Tom Robertson would conceal the goodness of his
heart beneath the veil of a rasping, defiant, and
pungent cynicism ; Mr. George Rose introduced for
the amusement of the company the immortal Mrs.
Brown • poor Tom Morten stood by the fire, his coat
tightly 'buttoned, his pipe never from his mouth,
suggesting topics for the muse of Browning or a series
of illustrations for Paracelsue ; and upon the beauti.
fully mobile face of Paul Gray, as he listened to all
that passed, WWI an expression now of Irish fun, and
now of thoughtful intel • ence.
Abiere ad plows : all that was most brilliant in the
promise and performance of those days has followed
the days themselves. In 1866 or 1867 the Bneripton
Establishment was broken up. Tom Hood settled at
Penge, an•l for the • Friday nights' were substituted
the meeting of the ' Serious Family,' held on Satur-
days at some chambers in Gray's Inn,
Between Tom Hood and W. J. Prowse there existed
a friendship whose peculiar closeness was quite in-
telligible to those who had studied the characters of
the two men. Hood was a remarkably handsome, and
was intended by Nature to be physically a very
powerful man. Naturally, too, though the sinister
and even malignant influences to which he was too
frequently exposed warped his feelings and distorted
his views, he was kind-hearted, gentle,and affectionate.
He was a warm friend, and was lavish in the
generosity with which he assisted all those whom he
liked and whom it was in his power to heliitst
taste* were for the most part the tasted' of the English

gentleman who her been bred in the country. He i
loved flowers, gardening, birds, cats, and dogs with •
passionate and unfeigned affection. He admired feats
of daring and skill in games At Oxford lie was nme
what .if a dtleflanor, but he had Irouglit away with
him from the place healthy ideas and useful ex•
periences. Prowse, on the other hand, concealed the
heart of a her, in a weakly and insignificant body.
Ile was short of stature and plain of countenance.
His forehead, indeed, wee noble, and his face wail re-
deemed from ill.favour by the light which played over
it from eyes whose expressh in spoke of intellectual
power and tender magnanimity combined. Unlike as
the two men were in presence, in brain, even in social
education and knowledge, their natures were still
traversed by similar veins. There was the same
nobility In each; not a taw of the same prejudices and
tastes; the same high standard of thought and action
we, accepted by both. Prowse admired the manliness
of Hood ; Hood admired the genius of Prowse. Prowse
was, moreover, incomparably the ablest and most
useful cintributor whom Hood enlisted under his
, banner when lie was appointed to the editorship of
I pun, For instance, his Nicholas, the irrepressible
wine-bibbing, mendacious, dissolute old man, who
used week after week to addresis ' his noble sportsmen'
on the subjects of the hour in the racing, the crlcketing,
or aquatic world, and who never to the last redeemed
his promise of presenting the public with his treatise
on " Knurr and Spell," was a. conception that may be
named in the same breath as Captain Coetigan or
, Teames. It was Prowse's ambition to write a volume
of travels, and hat his life been spared he would have
asenredly made his mark indelibly in the department
of literature. He was, however, not only an accom-
plished, versatile, and original author in prose ; he
wee a writer of verse so neat and tinhbed, so really
pathetic, and so lightly laughter-moving, that one may
venture to call him a true poet. Here is a specimen of
his metrieal performance of the more sombre
character. It is called "My Lost Ohl Age," and
appeared in Fun about eleven years ago :
I'm only nine and-twenty yet.
Though young experience makes me sage;
So how on earth can I forget
The memory of my lost old age I
Of manhood's prime let other. boast ;
It ennies too late or goes too seal;
At times he fate I envy most
Is that f slippere.l pantaloon !

In daym of old, a twelvemonth back !
I Imighed and quaffed and chaffed my fill.;
And now, a broken-winded hark,
I'm weak, and worn, and faint, and ill.
Life's owning chapter pleased inn weU,
Too hurriedly I turned the page.
I spoiled the volume. . . Who can tell
What might have been my boat old age
I lived my life, I had my day;
And now I feel it more and more,
The game I had not strength to play
Seems better than it seemed of yore.
I watched the sports with earnest eyes,
That gleam with joy before It ends;
for plainly I can hear the cries
That hail the triumph of my friends.

We work so hard, we age so soon,
We live so swiftly, one and all.
That ere our day be fairly noon.
The ohm-lows eastward seem to fall.
Some tender light may gild them yet,
As yet Ws not so very cold:
Son the whole I woo t regret

My slender chance of growing old.
These lines were hot too sadly prophetic. In little
more than three years after they were written Prowse
hdd down his hopeful, brave, generous, loyal life at
Nice, and modern EtLlish letters had lost a man who
was heal and shouldero above any of his contemporary
colleagues, and who had in him the makings of one
who, under happier times, would have permanently
embellished an.l enriched English authorship in the
nineteenth century.
Hood never had anything like the rich fund of
buoyant animal spirits which was possessed by his
friend Prowse to the last. His temperament was
essentially melancholic, and with this melancholy was
blended a perpetually haunting sense of tedium and
ennui. The shadow of the dark valley fell upon all
that he wrote, except when he was writing for purely
comic effect, and the shadow was frequently deepened
by the gloom of and languor.
The selection which Mrs. Broderip has made of her
brother's verses furni-hes an ever-present proof of this.
Take such lines as these, from a poem entitled" Going
to Pieces":—
When o'er my heart the death chills steal,
Ere the poor jester for aye dece uses,
Grant, Gracious Power, my heart may feel
I go to peace when I go to Pieces.
Or these—
For peace will he won when life is done.
Beyond the gloom lies the gold.
To its the hour of the setting sun
Has a charts that is lacked of old.
Again—
Once dreamt I, 1 should spread the sod
Ott Pegasus ineyhap
But woke to find I had to plod
Round weary lap on lap.
Well, let a I tot a craven plank
Recuvi the end desired
"He who lies hore to slumber hank,
For somehow he aft 9 tired."
Traces of this kind of inspiration might be multiplied
Indefinitely from Gm volume which Hood's eider has
so grecr•fully edited. And there is ne doubt that the
naturally sombre cast of his thoughts was further
darkened by the personal losses which he sustained.
Hood had Seen most of 1114 London friends whom he
knew best and liked most prematurely drop off.
Wherever he turned he was beset by memorb s of
those who had gone before, and to this feeling he has
given very pathetic utterance in "Copy : A Jester's
In Memoriam"
And yet the task at times is hard:
I turn my pate-re o'er—
To come upon • hlack-edged card:
Poor Tom I my heart is sore
To think upon that vacant chair.

. . .
. . .
What, not a jest or pun at call
Nay, mad the journals through:
Mr eyes upon a journal fall
That tells, dear Jack, of you I
. .
Yon picture, Paul. your pencil drew;
That poem. Jeff, you penned it.
Is there much 'cop?' more to dot
A. man so longs to end it
Is there a world beyond the—pun,
And free from verses sloppy I
Premise, if so, I own, for one,
tin getting tired of "copy !"
It says much for his cleverness and versatility that
he succeeded in being as comic as he was. From the
first he seems to have fixed his attention too unreser
redly on one aspect of the genius of his father. In
this be only followed, andwas no doubt influenced by,
the public taste. When he commenced his life it was
In the character of a more or less comic writer. He
was thrown into the society of men who thought a
poor jinn WM humour, and who were unaware of the
distinction between antithesis and epigram. And
what a busy, a fatally busy, lifo it was The frame
of a Hercules could not indefinitely have endured the
toils which poor Hood imposed upon himself. With
more fresh air and physical exercise he might probably
have lived to old age. He was powerfully built, he
had a decided tendency to "put on flesh," and he
never looked in really good health. It would have
been wonderful if he had. From ten or eleven to four
at the War Office; after that a few business calls, a
chat with a friend in a club, or in what did duty for a
club; then a cab home to a six o'clock dinner ; after
dinner a nap, which lasted till ten or eleven; a bout
of writing, which, with the assistance of strong coffee,
went on till four or five in the morning for weeks
together; four hours' feverish sleep ; then the War
Office again, and no on do cap). This for upwards of
a decade was Tons Hood's daily existence. Rather
more than ten years before his death he left the War
Office. But it was too late permanently to benefit his
system. The needs of disease were mown. The old
habits remained. The customs at a healthy literary
worker it was beyond his power to contract. Tom Hood
was physically crushed and prostrate long before the
end which he anticipated, if not with hope, at leant
with indifference, came."
To those who remember Tom Hood as the brilliant,
handsome, dashing Oxford undergraduate, with some-
thing of foppishness, it may be, in his manner, but
with a bold, open countenance radiant with intelli-
gence, and a fine manly figure -a lad of whom it was
said, both at. Oxford and elsewhere, probably with
truth, that he might do or be anything he chose—
there is something profoundly melancholy in the
retrospect of his hard-working career, with its
premature close. As we look at the volume of verse
which Mrs. Broderip has edited, and contrast with
that what their author was himself, one is reminded
of the 'words of the herald in the "Electra," "And
now all that is left of the hero is this little handful of

duet." Happily for those who knew the worth of. the
man, and for those who, believin in the Gospel of the
Divinity of Labour, decline to think that any career
of industry can be in vain, another and more consoling
reflection remains. If they cannot think of Tom
Hood an having fulfilled the whole promise of his
early years, as having been all that they imagined he
might be; if they are compelled to remark that the
conditions under which his character were destined to
develop were but in a small degree calculated to
nurture and encourage fine instincts and noble
ambitions—they may on the other hand recollect—and
how few of those who have gone can their friends
boast such a recollection ?—that, in the face of
olutacles and disadvantagee, Tom Hood did an
immense amount of honest manly work; that he
laboured to the last with a true and brave heart; that
in every relation of life, an friend and husband, he
did what seemed to him to be his duty; that he was
never conscioudy unjust; that he never did a mean or
ungenerous act; that he wan never an happy am when
he was of assistance to those whom he loved or liked.
The man on whose tombstone such an epitaph may be
written, whether his career did or did not realise all
its earlier hopes, cannot be said to have lived in vain.
—T. H. S. Escorr, in Belgravia,

THE GREAT BENEVOLENT soon:ins.
GRAND MUTED ORDER OP ODDPELLOWS.
The fifth and last day'a sitting took place Friday at
Wrexham. Mr. John Holley, of the Chester district,
was nnanimnualy elected Grand Master for the next
two years, and a vote of thanks was passed to the re-
tiring Grand Master.—For the post of Deputy Grand
Master Mr. Marshall (Darlington), was electe& Bro.
Liveney was re-elected Grand Secretary. It was
agreed to hold the 179 meeting at Swansea.

- THE MANCHESTIR UNITY 01, ODDTEL-Lo* WS.
The Grand Master Friday announced to the Annual
Moveable Committee of the Manchester Unity in
session at Oldham, that Mr. Henry Ratcliffe' the
corresponding secretary to the order, died shortly alter
eleven o'clock yesterday at Mancheeter. A severe
attack of rheumatic gout prevented his attending the
opening of the meeting. The painful intelligences's'
received with expressions of profound sorrow, and the
meeting was adjourned for an hour. Ho bad been
secretary thirty years. Among the delegeleesupennt
were Henry Ra&ord Pro.CR.., Bridport ; W. N.
Western, P.G.M., W. P. Sticklaad, P.G„ and TOM
Nesbitt, Per. Sec., Poole.
THE DRUIDS
The delegates assembled Friday morning, at War-
rington, the Grand Master (Mr. E. Butterworth, of
Rochdale), presiding. For grand master there was
only one nomination, viz. Mr. Thomas Shemeld, of
Sheffield, the vice-grand Master for the past year, and
he was unanimously elected. Mr. S. 'R. Brown, of
Mitzeitater, was also unanimously moolsolad grand
soeratory•