NOTABILITIES AT BRIGHTON.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXIII, Issue 7484, 25 February 1885, Page 3

NOTABILITIES AT BRIGHTON.

Mr Archibald Forbes, in the course of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on England's winter watering place, writes as follows:

Brighton has its unwritten laws. On week days you may dress how you lite; but on "Church Parade," the great Sunday promenade from 1 to 2, it is de rigueur to appear in a frock coat and tall hat. You may wait' on the King's road when you please, either forenoon or afternoon, and ride as well—all day the, esplanade is crowded with groups of young equestriennes under the tuition of solemn riding-masters; but it is only in the afternoon that it is the correct thing to drive. The concourse of carriages commences about 3, and lasts till the dusk comes up out of the sea. Solemn chariots of dowagers; smart britskas and landaus; the sprightly Victoria, with the befurred servants and the high stepping ho«ses; mail phaetons driven by moustached old gentlemen sitting solitary,. or : by mere youthful Jehus who prefer feminine, companionship; natty dogcarts with clever cobs between the shafts; here; and there a foiir-in-band, a tandem or two, and a good many open flies, filled—not to say crowded —with undeniably large families. The promenade is so thronged that fast walking is impracticable, and known faces confront one at every step. Trim little ladies,' in the neatest of costumes and the daintiest of hats and boots, work their dexterous way among the bath chairs, around some of which hover a crowd of male persons; for it is rather the fashion of beauty at Brighton to affect languor and the conspicuous repose of' a well-padded bath chair. 'Soldier officers, hele, severe, and clean shaven and close cropped,'walk in cbuples/cbntrasting with hirsute squires, bearded colonists, and bristly civilians of r the Indian service. This dapper little'man with the grey moustache is a general of cavalry, who led one of the heavy regiments into the cavalry charge; he has taken to politics now, and would fain regain the seat for Brighton he. lost at last election, That tall man with the long black beard is another Brighton ex-M.P. a mighty traveller, too; he was in/Australia the other day. Here come a ,; couple worth noting—the lady tall, with a "graceful walk not of this country—listen to her accents as you pass and you will recognise her for an American—is none other" than Mary Anderson, the actress, about whom the town went mad last autumn,' for tickets to whose first night on Saturday," when she re-opens the Lyeeuni in " Romeo and Juliet," a fierce struggle is raging de die in diem. Her companion—the short lithe man, with the.great eyes, the long black moustache,- and the undeniable Scotch face—is the novelist. who has delighted thousands : in both hemispheres with his "Princess of Thule," his "Daughter of Heth," and his " Beautiful Wretch." Way, there for this compact, square-shouldered man, with the strong loud : laughy the ■swarthy rubicund visage/ the. remarkable nose, and the red tie 1 That; laugh you will hear, and that visage see. soon out in your own land—the laugh and 'face of. tne most brilliant journalist, eloquent orator,: and wide-ranging scholar of this his day and generation—none other than* Augustus Sala. The slender little mail by him, with the fragile eager face, bo beautiful in its profile, is Lord Ronald Gower, the younger brother of the Duke of Sutherland—author, sculptor, ' enthusiast, 1 and good fellow. Lewis Wingfield' saunters ulster-clad, with thought on;his- brow. He shares with Godwin the reputation of having the fullest knowledge of the costumes of bygone days, and his work. now, in a brief interval from writing not over j

good novels, is the " dressing " of the newpiece at the Lyceum. A heavy barouche rolls by close to the rails, and one recognises at a glance its male occupant by the pert upturned nose, the firm clear-cut c'liri, the bushy red whiskers tinged with grey. Maccallum More is letting the House of Lords " slide," and prefers the King's road and its balmy sunshine to a combat of words with Lord Salisbury. Nor are all the Commons faithful to their duties. Look at this little fellow, with the keen face and the great moustache twisted up at the ends. He suggests, somehow, a fox terrier, with tba air of " snap," his alertness of aspect, his keenness of eye. At present he is but the leader in the Lower House of a party that consists of three besides himself; but Lord Randolph, Churchill is believed in more by the majority of the Conservatives than is Sir Stafford ■ Northeote, and, if he lives, the day will come that shall see the little man Premier of England. Meanwhile he is chatting, probably about a horse, with a dapper, bow-legged, almost pretematurally wide-awake looking man, in the tightest of trousers and the best-fitting of frock coats —a man who looks (nor do his looks belie him) to have spent the greater part of his life in the saddle. A consummate. horseman, indeed, is Sir George Wombwell, young-looking still, although he was one of the Six Hundred who rode into the valley of Balaclava. Hard on Sir "Garge's" heels comes another cavalryman, of quite another pattern. Fred Burnaby: is of colossal attitude—he is the biggest and strongest man in the British army; he is Colonel of the Blues ; he rode to Khiva, and astonished an Arab sheikh with Cockle's , pills; he fought with Baker Pasha" in Bulgaria and the Soudan ; and he was the first man over the Arab entrenchment at. El Teb. Burnaby is grinning the sardonic grin which he means for a genial greeting: to another big, burly man, who' drives ja3t in a Victoria, with his'still beautiful wife by his side. Big and burly he would need to be, for he is none other than " Atlas," who carries the "World" on his broad shoulders. Amarvellous, versatile man this t Edmund Yates—dramatist, novelist, f euille-'■•'' tonist, verse-writer, talker, lecturer,'editor/: and, I should add, staunch friend. Six., months ago Lord Coleridge sentenced, him to four months' imprisonment for a libel 0f.." which he was unconscious : he waits now;, the decision of a technical point, either for' relief from that sentence or for, hie. con-, signment to gaol. Few men could fight, J! own, the consciousness, of a-suspense so trying j but Yates has employed the inter-., val in writing a couple of. volumes of memoirs; which will, be published in a'day or two, and which will conipete with'the* "Malniesbury Memoirs" and- Froude's " Garlyle" in the "Books of the Season." Look at the bluff, bright-faced man, with, the curly-brimmed hat well on the back of the head, bushy 'greyish-brown hair clus- * tering about his ears, and the defiant " moustache turned up with a swagger over the cheek in a fashion that reminds one of the late Victor Emmanuel. What chances,, what prospects were his; and how has he wasted them ? The eldest son of a great Premier, .from whom he inherited a vast fortune, himself a -man of real ability, a slashing speaker, and a good fellow,; hemight have been anything, and he is nothing—except Sir Robert Peel;. obliged to a friend for a seat in his mail phaeton, the tenant of a bedroom at the club hard by, Drayton -Manor, with all its art treasures gone to the hammer, the last racehorse sold, the town house gone, and nothing left but the insatiable appetite for gambling. Do jou care to' note no bad sample of an Australian Colonist here on. this Brighton Esplanade ? Well, this compact, rather peremptory, yet good-natured looking man will serve your turn. He has just won a lawsuit that makes him richer by about .£100,000; but such a sum more or less is of no great moment to the younger, but probably the wealthier son of "Big i Clarke " —Sir William's, younger brother; known to the Victorian folk by the familiar title of " Joe Clarke." Arid would you.' i see a fair, young Australian bride ? Well, here she.comes on the arm, on the stalwarfc arm, of her young husband, the son of an. English earl, himself a man whom all Australia knows and honours by the name of Ivo Bligh. Look at this white-bearded senior, sitting, rather than riding, on the superb hack, with the groom behind him mounted on a 300-guinea cob. A curious life surely his has been. In his - youth his Hebrew father brought. hinr"down the Tigris from Bagdad, the family, fleeing for their lives because of Arab hatred, against the race to which they belonged. I remember him in Bombay, slouching around in white Oriental dress. Now he is Sir Aißert Sassoon, the owner of the finest house in Brighton, one of the finest houses in London, the head of a family, that are a power in society, in the city, and in every haunt of commerce in the known world.

Brighton has its wrecks. Here is one of them, wheeled in .a bath chair. You greet him, and his effort to articulate a reply is painful, and tells too surely of paralysis. Who was cheerier among the cheery than dear old Fred Clay, song writer, music composer, the genial friend of everybody? It seems but the other day, yet it' was months ago, that one listened to and shared in the plaudits that followed the falling of the cutrtain on a comic opera, of which he had written the music. That very evening,> as in the flush of success, he *as walking from the theatre to the club; the insidious enemy blighted him, and ever since he has been helpless and speechless.' Neither helpless nor- speechless, although now strangely silent, save when moved, is this little bronzed man with the compact torso, and the eye that misses nothing. In themidst of this throng is Stanley, I wonder, as he saunters, thinking' of those African solitudes to which he h» given so much of his life;; of that, great river whose future toall ages stands identified with the name of the dauntless Welshman who will persist in calling himself a son of America? He is the man of action, the strenuous doer. Over against him there lounges the fribble, who wastes a fine intellect on the quackeries of a sham ajstheticism, and squanders his time in chatter over the harmony of colours. Oscar Wilde might have won reputation in literature,' for he has genius; but he has chosen the ignoble part of. frivolity, invents " combinations," is a self-elected arbiter on dress, has his hair curled twice a day, dawdles through life the caricature of manhood. ' One might fill column on column in outlining the personnel of the throng that has gathered in the King's road this sunshiny afternoon, ' and more sketching might be done inside the big morningroom of the Orleans Club, whose spick-arid-span new red-brick front looks over the esplanade on ,to the sea, or in the spacious bow-windows of the old " New Club," much frequented of half-pay officers, and gentlemen of Jewish extraction. But the band has ceased to the red sunset is fading, the moonbeams are falling on. the calm face of the ocean, and the monde of'Brighton-super-mare is fast dispersing homewards, bent on late afternoon tea.