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BLACK STICK PAPERS. NO. 5.

BY MRS. RICHMOND RITCHIE.

EGERIA IN BRIGHTON.

I.

It is curious to see how quickly people and generations change their fashions. Wits, bricks, and bonnets alike whirl in every direction, shoot out loops or pinnacles, then suddenly collapse to flattest, plainest reserve. Just now our cities, as well as our

clothes and our impressions, belong to every age and country, passing with bewildering rapidity from Grecian to Gothic, from Chinese pagodas to Byzantine mosaic, to Decadence, to Renaissance, to Swiss cottages, or what not. Caves and Stonchenges may be the next fashion, for all I know. Perhaps Brighton is more than any other place an example of this indescribable jumble of rapid fancies, except that the sea line remains fortunately unchanged, whatever may be happening on shore. And yet, with all the ugliness of the huge hotels rearing their pretentious fronts, of the houses that are turned out-and all their contents by the hundred dozen, there is a certain magnificence in the long line of human habitation coasting the great sea; lit by the morning gleams and by the sunsets, and then later on by the moon and the stars, and the thousand lights of different radiance, shining up as the daylight goes out. There is a certain individuality in the breath of Brighton air, as well as in the busy streets, where so much of the pretty homely past remains, notwithstanding all that has been added to it: from the Oriental fashions of the Regency to the Cubitt-and-portico-taste of early Victorian times succeeding the all-conquering flourishes of the eighteenth century. These flourishes, for the present, we have unanimously consented to ignore in our advancing culture, just as Catherine Morland rejected the whole city of Bath; and the writer feels that it requires no little courage nowadays to confess that sometimes in the evening when the light is clear, and the hundred spires and domes and pinnacles of the Pavilion rise 1 Copyright, 1901, by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie in the United States of America.

in a multitude upon the sky, a certain glamour has fallen upon her soul, and she has looked up and almost expected to hear the cries of the Moslem watchmen calling upon the faithful from the minarets.

6

An adventurous traveller who got as far as Brighton in 1821 has left an account of the Pavilion, which at that period nobody need have blushed for admiring with all the rest of the world. To quote Dr. Evans at length would be impossible, but a few sentences will perhaps suffice to give a general impression of his style. It is the inside of things rather than the outside that he deals with. The aerial imagery of fancy, the embellishments of fertile invention, profusely described in the "Thousand and One Nights;" the popular tales of magic involving the enchanted palaces of the Genii,' he says, writing of the Pavilion, 'fall short in splendour of detail to this scene of imposing grandeur, to these beautiful combinations and effects of myriads of glittering objects, in the plenitude of art and refinement of taste. . . .'

Any one of us who may have lately attended a concert at the Pavilion will hardly recognise the following account of the musicroom: A dome gilt with green and gold and ornamented with sparkling scales, and sunflowers which diminish in size to the centre; from which centre (among other things) hangs an ornament representing in all its vivid tints a sunflower, in all the luxuriance of seeming cultivation; from which ornament again a glittering pagoda of cut glass depends, also a water-lily surrounded by golden dragons and enriched by various transparent devices, all emanating from the heathen mythology of the Chinese. . . . The dome itself' (so we read) ' appears to have been excavated from a rock of solid gold, it is supported by a convex cone, intersecting itself by an octagonal base.' The mind of the reader is further dazzled by long descriptions of columns of crimson, enormous serpents twisted in their diversity of colour and terrific expression,

blue and yellow fretwork, rows of bamboo confined by ribbons, canopies, suspended lamps, marble statuary by Westmacott ornamented with ormolu columns, and finally an effulgent mirror encompassed by a glittering canopy.' 'This scene of radiant and: imposing splendour,' we are told, ' imparts the highest credit to the professional talents of F. Crace, Esq., and his qualified assistants.'. The banqueting-hall is described at equal length. 'A toutensemble of matchless beauty, rendering words inadequate to do it justice, exhibiting grandeur without tawdriness, good taste as

emanating from intellectual cultivation; and all this the work of F. Jones, Esq.,' who seems to have run a dead-heat with F. Crace, Esq., and his qualified assistants.

Mrs. Barbauld, dear woman, has been called in to add poetry to this passionate prose.

And, lo! where Cæsar saw with proud disdain
The wattled hut and skin of azure stain,
Corinthian columns rear their graceful forms,
And light verandas brave the wintry storms.
&c., &c., &c.

II.

The writer feels within herself some mysterious impulse to emulate this bygone traveller as she writes of the great city by the sea. When her father used to start off for Brighton with his inkstand and his blotting-pad and his gold pen, it was always known that he meant play as well as work. He loved his work and his play at Brighton, and the playfellows he met there. She can remember him standing with John Leech one sunshiny morning at the window of a little ground-floor room looking towards the sea, and watching the stream of people as they flowed along the Parade. My father may have seen Miss Crawley in her chair and Rawdon Crawley and Becky herself tripping attendance; and no doubt John Leech saw dear Mr. Briggs and his smiling family, and the little Scotch terriers, and those majestic whiskered beings and those ladies with the funny little square boots, and the flowing ringlets blowing in the wind. . . . I can just remember the two friends laughing and talking together as they stood in the window, when a droll-looking Volunteer went by.

I have often tried to make out the little lodging-house, but I dare say it is gone, and the Métropole or the Grand Hotel or some majestic emporium is in the place where it stood.

Of an evening, from our present windows, if we look we can see a fairy-like illumination flashing out to sea-a glittering stream of lights in bright arcades, and running from end to end of an endless pier, where music plays, and where the inhabitants of Brighton disport themselves when their day's work is over. Alas! perhaps some of us still prefer the memory of the old chainpier to the presence of all these dazzling improvements '-the old pier, which stood firm for so many years, while the waves flung their spray against its shiplike spars, all hung with seaweeds

and tenanted by barnacles enjoying the sweet salt darkness underneath. Up above, the old pier used to be haunted by seafaring men and their fishwives. One of these mer-women, who remembered my father-has he not written of the old chain-pier in Philip'?—kept her stall to the end, till the last great storm came to sweep the old sea-mark away. It was indeed a haven for memories: Helen Faucit loved it, and used to pace there with her husband; my father used to sit there smoking, so his old friend the fishwife told me.

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Miss Fanny Macaulay, who dwelt at Brighton, once said to me, People think I am lonely here! Why, the room is simply crowded with the thoughts of those I have loved,' and so this garish strand seems to be to some of us. Beyond the pier, higher up on the east cliff, there is a house neither romantic to look at nor marked in any way, but as I pass I think of my father's good friend and ours, his publisher, now gone from us, who owned it once long ago; and I remember how we came there after my father's death to find that friendship which has never changed— that legacy which generous true hearts leave, in turn, to their children's children.

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Another of my father's old playmates at Brighton still sits in her chair by her fireside, not far from Horizontal Place,' with her own memories of the spot where she has welcomed so many delightful people, and made them happy by her wit and kindness. Her father, Horace Smith, dwelt at Brighton too, and his name links us with all the great literary names of the beginning of the last century. He and his brother James knew all the interesting persons of whom they wrote in the 'Rejected Addresses.' Miss Horace Smith has shown me many of the letters from Byron, from Shelley, from Leigh Hunt, chiefly sent from abroad, thanking Horace Smith for past kindnesses, for books bound and sent off to Pisa, for special editions discovered, for bills paid in London. The letters seemed very long, on very large sheets of paper, and appeared to me-besides the thanks to be full of fresh and elaborate requisitions. Miss Horace Smith has had many links of every sort. She once told me she began her fashionable life by driving out with Princess Charlotte, who had stopped her coach to pick up some children with whom little Tizey Smith was at play. Again, I have heard her describing the dandies of her youth; one-a Caradoc, she said-so handsome and magnificent that when he fought a duel in Paris and was wounded in the arm, all

the great ladies appeared with their sleeves cut away and tied up with red ribbons-couleur de sang. The last time I saw her I complained of a stormy wind. 'I I am afraid you feel it,' I said, even by your fireside.' 'Yes, I feel it,' she answered bravely, and I suffer from it; and then I say to myself "I am part of the universe." Prospero himself could not have spoken better.

Brighton has scarcely received its due recognition of late. Miss Crawley and Becky Sharp and Miss Honeyman and Lady Anne Newcome, of course, are all old-established residents and patrons; but since the days of 'Vanity Fair' and 'The Newcomes' I can hardly remember any mention of Brighton in contemporaneous literature.

I feel rather jealous for Brighton! Neither Dickens nor Bulwer nor Disraeli nor Scott nor George Eliot nor Kingsley ever sent any heroes and heroines to revive there. Miss Austen writes of the comparative merits of Southend and Cromer, lingers fondly at Lyme, or in the Pump Room at Bath, but ignores Brighthelmstone, as it must have been still called in her day. Mrs. Oliphant goes to St. Andrews and the Firth of Forth; Black floats from northern sea to northern sea; Mrs. Gaskell paints Whitby ; Kingsley loves Clovelly. Brighton is ignored by an ungrateful generation of heroes and heroines. They are, of course, a fastidious race. They like to break their hearts in style, in beautiful parks or in lonely crumbling mansions-not in packed lodging terraces, with neighbours by the dozen and Bath-chairmen for an audience. They prefer solitude, the midland counties, Scotland, the Lakes, the Orkneys, the Isle of Man. Brighton has certainly nothing so delightful to produce as that enchanting boat-house to which Peggotty took David Copperfield at Yarmouth, but many a Bleak House might be pointed out; and as for splendour, Disraeli himself might not have disdained the glories of the Pavilion, as described by my friend and predecessor, Dr. Evans.

III.

But the Fairy Blackstick does not greatly concern herself with Brighton as it is, nor even with its reminiscences, though they comprise kings, courts, favourites, and the Duke of Wellington himself. Its adjacent dependency of Roedean interests her very much more.

As she is too old to fear being sent to school again herself.

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