A NOTABLE VICTORIAN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18494, 3 September 1923, Page 12

A NOTABLE VICTORIAN

How often when one reads in Che biographies of people who died last century of the strange, almost inconceivable * world •of the ■• early Victorian era, one wonders , what these people would have thought if they had 'lived into our days, when voices across seas can be heard af tea-tables, and men fly to India through the clouds, and all the other wonders of our time. And, to-day a lady still with us tells us wliafi it was liko when she lived in the days _ when children were taken from their cribs•■■ at seven in the morning and plunged overhead by nurses in a bath of cold water, and Che practice, of country doctors was simply to bleed the patients, and murderers' bodies hung in gibbets, and the ladies of Edinburgh went about in sedanchairs (spates a writer in an exchange). And this lady has her wireless set and lias seen aeroplanes in the skv, and one would not be surprised to hear:that she. has fravelled in one. •Mrs. Haldane, the mother of, Lord Hal- j dane, who has given us these" reminis- ' cences in a delightful article she has written for the magazine of St. Colombia's Church, the chief Scottish church in London, is surely herself on© of the wonders of our time. She was born in 1825, and was eleven years old when " Pickwick Papers" were coming out. She probably knew people who had fought at Waterloo and Trafalgar. To-day she lives at Cloan, in Perthshire, and "follows'- the events and movements of the day .with'. all keenness. It. is now clear that with such a mother, who could read when she was three, and at the age of ton read Voltaire, Lord Haldane could not have prevented himself reaching eminence.