MID-VICTORIAN MEMORIES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 17, 22 April 1908, Page 60

MID-VICTORIAN MEMORIES.

Society is gossiping over a new autobiography entitled “Leaves from a Life,” which tells many entertaining stories about prominent people. The anonymity of the author is very thinly veiled. It is obvious from internal evidence that she is a daughter of Mr. W. P. Frith, R.A., the well-known artist, who was decorated by the King recently on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Some of her stories are amusing,-and some more than a little unkind. Here, for instance, is a penpicture of the diminutive Poet Laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin:— “When we were good Mr. Austin used to give us each a rose, and 1 really think 1 ceased to worship him from afar when I caught him standing on a chair to put Mrs. Yates’ rose in her splendid black hair. .... Edmund Yates and I simply doubled up with laughter, and escaped to the uttermost ends of the garden. We dare not let him discover that we had seen him, though Mrs. Yates had perceived us, ami was hardly able to br still until the rose was arranged to his satisfaction. “Mr. Austin was always rather haughty and distant in his dealings with domestics, but mama had found him Mary, and she secretly worshipped him. I remember he was on the point one morning of leaving Mrs. Yates and myself to repair to the study, as usual, when just as he was tinning to go he saw that Mary hail left some of her implements behind her. He rang the bell, and when she appeared he drew himself up to his full height—something under 5 feet—and remarked severely. ‘Mary, take away yon diish and bluster!’” Of the Brownings there arc some entertaining little sketches, too: — “I knew Kolx-rt Browning well. In the daytime he always wore a red tie,

and had besides that to mark him out from the rest the most perfect manner and -delightful way of talking that was possible to find. Browning was a short man, always most carefully dressed; he had a splendid head. . . . "I dp not recollect his saying much about his own poems. I know the Browning Societies use to amuse him, and he was particularly tickled by the solemn dissolving of the Browning Society of Girton. A girl I knew from her longclothes stag? was the treasurer; when the society eame to an end the treasurer voted that the money in hand should be spent on chocolates!” There is a piquant description of a ball given at Y’ork in honour of the present King and Queen some time after they were married. The royalties daneed a square dance within four red ropes “to keep out our contaminating presence.” The authoress found “public balls plus royalty” decidedly stupid and unamusing.

Oscar Wilde and his mother were acquaintances of the authoress of “Leaves From a Life,” and she has something to say about the former: — “I am sure Oscar Wilde was a brilliant genius. As sure as I am that he was made, and that the absurd adultation he received from man and woman alike turned his head. He was evil, even in the Oxford days, but with the evil of insanity; and I wish the day would come when such brilliant and unbalanced men could be taken early, and so treated by scientific men that their brains would lie used for good instead for doing awful harm. Many a gallant lad owes his damnation to Oscar Wilde. As for me, I never liked him. He was sensual-look-ing, and always appeared to me to exhale an unhappy and disgusting atmosphere, and I am not surprised at his dreadful fate. “The first time I saw him he was fawned on and feted by all. The last time I saw him was in France. He was standing in a little wood by a bicycle, and as I came by his hand went up to his hat. 1 did not appear to know him, but I shall never forget his face. It was that of a lost sold gazing through the gates of Paradise. He had always met me when he was the guest; now there lay between that time and then th,? long sufferings and disgrace he had sold his brilliant birthright for,and he was hankering I am sure, for the return of what would never come back. There have been many attempts since his death to whitewash his memory. I think his friends would be wiser to let him rest in peace.”