Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 291

Beschreibung

Biography by the author of Treasure Island. According to Wikipedia: "Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (25 March 1833 - 12 June 1885) was Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, remarkable for his versatility. Known to the world as the inventor of telpherage, he was an electrician and cable engineer, a lecturer, linguist, critic, actor, dramatist and artist."

Leseprobe

MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

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PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.  1833-1851.

CHAPTER III.  1851-1858.

CHAPTER IV.  1859-1868.

CHAPTER V. - NOTES OF TELEGRAPH VOYAGES, 1858 TO 1873.

CHAPTER VI. - 1869-1885.

CHAPTER VII. 1875-1885.

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

ON the death of Fleeming Jenkin, his family and friends determined  to publish a selection of his various papers; by way of  introduction, the following pages were drawn up; and the whole,  forming two considerable volumes, has been issued in England.  In  the States, it has not been thought advisable to reproduce the  whole; and the memoir appearing alone, shorn of that other matter  which was at once its occasion and its justification, so large an  account of a man so little known may seem to a stranger out of all  proportion.  But Jenkin was a man much more remarkable than the  mere bulk or merit of his work approves him.  It was in the world,  in the commerce of friendship, by his brave attitude towards life,  by his high moral value and unwearied intellectual effort, that he  struck the minds of his contemporaries.  His was an individual  figure, such as authors delight to draw, and all men to read of, in  the pages of a novel.  His was a face worth painting for its own  sake.  If the sitter shall not seem to have justified the portrait,  if Jenkin, after his death, shall not continue to make new friends,  the fault will be altogether mine.

R. L S.

SARANAC, OCT., 1887.

CHAPTER I.

The Jenkins of Stowting - Fleeming's grandfather - Mrs. Buckner's  fortune - Fleeming's father; goes to sea; at St. Helena; meets King  Tom; service in the West Indies; end of his career - The Campbell- Jacksons - Fleeming's mother - Fleeming's uncle John.

 IN the reign of Henry VIII., a family of the name of Jenkin,  claiming to come from York, and bearing the arms of Jenkin ap  Philip of St. Melans, are found reputably settled in the county of  Kent.  Persons of strong genealogical pinion pass from William  Jenkin, Mayor of Folkestone in 1555, to his contemporary 'John  Jenkin, of the Citie of York, Receiver General of the County,' and  thence, by way of Jenkin ap Philip, to the proper summit of any  Cambrian pedigree - a prince; 'Guaith Voeth, Lord of Cardigan,' the  name and style of him.  It may suffice, however, for the present,  that these Kentish Jenkins must have undoubtedly derived from  Wales, and being a stock of some efficiency, they struck root and  grew to wealth and consequence in their new home.

Of their consequence we have proof enough in the fact that not only  was William Jenkin (as already mentioned) Mayor of Folkestone in  1555, but no less than twenty-three times in the succeeding century  and a half, a Jenkin (William, Thomas, Henry, or Robert) sat in the  same place of humble honour.  Of their wealth we know that in the  reign of Charles I., Thomas Jenkin of Eythorne was more than once  in the market buying land, and notably, in 1633, acquired the manor  of Stowting Court.  This was an estate of some 320 acres, six miles  from Hythe, in the Bailiwick and Hundred of Stowting, and the Lathe  of Shipway, held of the Crown IN CAPITE by the service of six men  and a constable to defend the passage of the sea at Sandgate.  It  had a chequered history before it fell into the hands of Thomas of  Eythorne, having been sold and given from one to another - to the  Archbishop, to Heringods, to the Burghershes, to Pavelys, Trivets,  Cliffords, Wenlocks, Beauchamps, Nevilles, Kempes, and Clarkes:  a  piece of Kentish ground condemned to see new faces and to be no  man's home.  But from 1633 onward it became the anchor of the  Jenkin family in Kent; and though passed on from brother to  brother, held in shares between uncle and nephew, burthened by  debts and jointures, and at least once sold and bought in again, it  remains to this day in the hands of the direct line.  It is not my  design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to give a history of  this obscure family.  But this is an age when genealogy has taken a  new lease of life, and become for the first time a human science;  so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to  trace out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we  study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton.   Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and  receive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our  life's story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the  biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.   From this point of view I ask the reader's leave to begin this  notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with the accession of  his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of  'Westward Ho!' was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of  Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam.  The Jenkins had now been  long enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be  Kentish folk themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in  particular their connection is singularly involved.  John and his  wife were each descended in the third degree from another Thomas  Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and brother to Accepted Frewen,  Archbishop of York.  John's mother had married a Frewen for a  second husband.  And the last complication was to be added by the  Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner, Vice-Admiral of  the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal cousin of  Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's wife,  and already the widow of another Frewen.  The reader must bear Mrs.  Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin  began life as a poor man.  Meanwhile, the relationship of any  Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a  problem almost insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus  exercised in her immediate circle, was in her old age 'a great  genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted.'  The names  Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem to have been interchangeable at  will; and yet Fate proceeds with such particularity that it was  perhaps on the point of name that the family was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant  and unpractical sons.  The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and  held the living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an  extreme example of the clergy of the age.  He was a handsome figure  of a man; jovial and jocular; fond of his garden, which produced  under his care the finest fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all  the family, very choice in horses.  He drove tandem; like Jehu,  furiously.  His saddle horse, Captain (for the names of horses are  piously preserved in the family chronicle which I follow), was  trained to break into a gallop as soon as the vicar's foot was  thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in the nine  miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door.  Debt was the man's  proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of his  church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy.  At  an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by  her he had two daughters and one son.  One of the daughters died  unmarried; the other imitated her father, and married  'imprudently.'  The son, still more gallantly continuing the  tradition, entered the army, loaded himself with debt, was forced  to sell out, took refuge in the Marines, and was lost on the Dogger  Bank in the war-ship MINOTAUR.  If he did not marry below him, like  his father, his sister, and a certain great-uncle William, it was  perhaps because he never married at all.

The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post- Office, followed in all material points the example of Stephen,  married 'not very creditably,' and spent all the money he could lay  his hands on.  He died without issue; as did the fourth brother,  John, who was of weak intellect and feeble health, and the fifth  brother, William, whose brief career as one of Mrs. Buckner's  satellites will fall to be considered later on.  So soon, then, as  the MINOTAUR had struck upon the Dogger Bank, Stowting and the line  of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders of the third brother,  Charles.

Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to  judge by these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and  their defect; but in the case of Charles, a man of exceptional  beauty and sweetness both of face and disposition, the family fault  had quite grown to be a virtue, and we find him in consequence the  drudge and milk-cow of his relatives.  Born in 1766, Charles served  at sea in his youth, and smelt both salt water and powder.  The  Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as I can make out, to the  land service.  Stephen's son had been a soldier; William (fourth of  Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy Braddock's in America,  where, by the way, he owned and afterwards sold an estate on the  James River, called, after the parental seat; of which I should  like well to hear if it still bears the name.  It was probably by  the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with the family  by his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in the  direction of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the  PROTHEE, 64, that the lad made his only campaign.  It was in the  days of Rodney's war, when the PROTHEE, we read, captured two large  privateers to windward of Barbadoes, and was 'materially and  distinguishedly engaged' in both the actions with De Grasse.  While  at sea Charles kept a journal, and made strange archaic pilot-book  sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of which survive for the  amusement of posterity.  He did a good deal of surveying, so that  here we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of Fleeming's  education as an engineer.  What is still more strange, among the  relics of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of  the PROTHEE, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for  all the world as it would have been done by his grandson.

On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from  scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the  man to refuse a request, far less to disobey a command.  Thereupon  he turned farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and  we find him married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the  daughter of a London merchant.  Stephen, the not very reverend, was  still alive, galloping about the country or skulking in his  chancel.  It does not appear whether he let or sold the paternal  manor to Charles; one or other, it must have been; and the sailor- farmer settled at Stowting, with his wife, his mother, his  unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.  Out of the six people  of whom his nearest family consisted, three were in his own house,  and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and Thomas) he appears  to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom.  He  hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and  Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself.  'Lord Rokeby, his  neighbour, called him kinsman,' writes my artless chronicler, 'and  altogether life was very cheery.'  At Stowting his three sons,  John, Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna,  were all born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is  through the report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has  been looking on at these confused passages of family history.

In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun.  It was the  work of a fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a  sister of Mrs. John.  Twice married, first to her cousin Charles  Frewen, clerk to the Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher  of the Black Rod, and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied  issue in both beds, and being very rich - she died worth about  60,000L., mostly in land - she was in perpetual quest of an heir.   The mirage of this fortune hung before successive members of the  Jenkin family until her death in 1825, when it dissolved and left  the latest Alnaschar face to face with bankruptcy.  The grandniece,  Stephen's daughter, the one who had not 'married imprudently,'  appears to have been the first; for she was taken abroad by the  golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792.  Next she  adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him abroad  with her - it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up  with him in Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor,  and got him a place in the King's Body-Guard, where he attracted  the notice of George III. by his proficiency in German.  In 1797,  being on guard at St. James's Palace, William took a cold which  carried him off; and Aunt Anne was once more left heirless.   Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved by the Admiral, who had a kindness  for his old midshipman, perhaps pleased by the good looks and the  good nature of the man himself, Mrs. Buckner turned her eyes upon  Charles Jenkin.  He was not only to be the heir, however, he was to  be the chief hand in a somewhat wild scheme of family farming.   Mrs. Jenkin, the mother, contributed 164 acres of land; Mrs.  Buckner, 570, some at Northiam, some farther off; Charles let one- half of Stowting to a tenant, and threw the other and various  scattered parcels into the common enterprise; so that the whole  farm amounted to near upon a thousand acres, and was scattered over  thirty miles of country.  The ex-seaman of thirty-nine, on whose  wisdom and ubiquity the scheme depended, was to live in the  meanwhile without care or fear.  He was to check himself in  nothing; his two extravagances, valuable horses and worthless  brothers, were to be indulged in comfort; and whether the year  quite paid itself or not, whether successive years left accumulated  savings or only a growing deficit, the fortune of the golden aunt  should in the end repair all.

On this understanding Charles Jenkin transported his family to  Church House, Northiam:  Charles the second, then a child of three,  among the number.  Through the eyes of the boy we have glimpses of  the life that followed:  of Admiral and Mrs. Buckner driving up  from Windsor in a coach and six, two post-horses and their own  four; of the house full of visitors, the great roasts at the fire,  the tables in the servants' hall laid for thirty or forty for a  month together; of the daily press of neighbours, many of whom,  Frewens, Lords, Bishops, Batchellors, and Dynes, were also  kinsfolk; and the parties 'under the great spreading chestnuts of  the old fore court,' where the young people danced and made merry  to the music of the village band.  Or perhaps, in the depth of  winter, the father would bid young Charles saddle his pony; they  would ride the thirty miles from Northiam to Stowting, with the  snow to the pony's saddle girths, and be received by the tenants  like princes.

This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and  goings of the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of  the lads.  John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, 'loud and  notorious with his whip and spurs,' settled down into a kind of  Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the shoes of his father and his aunt.   Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is briefly dismissed as 'a handsome  beau'; but he had the merit or the good fortune to become a doctor  of medicine, so that when the crash came he was not empty-handed  for the war of life.  Charles, at the day-school of Northiam, grew  so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became matter  of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner.  Hereupon  that tall, rough-voiced, formidable uncle entered with the lad into  a covenant:  every time that Charles was thrashed he was to pay the  Admiral a penny; everyday that he escaped, the process was to be  reversed.  'I recollect,' writes Charles, 'going crying to my  mother to be taken to the Admiral to pay my debt.'  It would seem  by these terms the speculation was a losing one; yet it is probable  it paid indirectly by bringing the boy under remark.  The Admiral  was no enemy to dunces; he loved courage, and Charles, while yet  little more than a baby, would ride the great horse into the pond.   Presently it was decided that here was the stuff of a fine sailor;  and at an early period the name of Charles Jenkin was entered on a  ship's books.

From Northiam he was sent to another school at Boonshill, near Rye,  where the master took 'infinite delight' in strapping him.  'It  keeps me warm and makes you grow,' he used to say.  And the stripes  were not altogether wasted, for the dunce, though still very 'raw,'  made progress with his studies.  It was known, moreover, that he  was going to sea, always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys;  and in his case the glory was not altogether future, it wore a  present form when he came driving to Rye behind four horses in the  same carriage with an admiral.  'I was not a little proud, you may  believe,' says he.

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his  father to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace.  The Bishop had heard  from his brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well,  and had an order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the  Royal Naval College at Portsmouth.  Both the Bishop and the Admiral  patted him on the head and said, 'Charles will restore the old  family'; by which I gather with some surprise that, even in these  days of open house at Northiam and golden hope of my aunt's  fortune, the family was supposed to stand in need of restoration.   But the past is apt to look brighter than nature, above all to  those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages of Stephen and  Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.

What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in  which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their  gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a  widow) at Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him, and visited at  Lord Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he  began to have 'bumptious notions,' and his head was 'somewhat  turned with fine people'; as to some extent it remained throughout  his innocent and honourable life.

In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the CONQUEROR,  Captain Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie.  The captain had  earned this name by his style of discipline, which would have  figured well in the pages of Marryat:  'Put the prisoner's head in  a bag and give him another dozen!' survives as a specimen of his  commands; and the men were often punished twice or thrice in a  week.  On board the ship of this disciplinarian, Charles and his  father were carried in a billy-boat from Sheerness in December,  1816:  Charles with an outfit suitable to his pretensions, a  twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which were ordered  into the care of the gunner.  'The old clerks and mates,' he  writes, 'used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy- boat, and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old  Kentish smuggler.  This to my pride, you will believe, was not a  little offensive.'

THE CONQUEROR carried the flag of Vice-Admiral Plampin, commanding  at the Cape and St. Helena; and at that all-important islet, in  July, 1817, she relieved the flagship of Sir Pulteney Malcolm.   Thus it befel that Charles Jenkin, coming too late for the epic of  the French wars, played a small part in the dreary and disgraceful  afterpiece of St. Helena.  Life on the guard-ship was onerous and  irksome.  The anchor was never lifted, sail never made, the great  guns were silent; none was allowed on shore except on duty; all day  the movements of the imperial captive were signalled to and fro;  all night the boats rowed guard around the accessible portions of  the coast.  This prolonged stagnation and petty watchfulness in  what Napoleon himself called that 'unchristian' climate, told  cruelly on the health of the ship's company.  In eighteen months,  according to O'Meara, the CONQUEROR had lost one hundred and ten  men and invalided home one hundred and seven, being more than a  third of her complement.  It does not seem that our young  midshipman so much as once set eyes on Bonaparte; and yet in other  ways Jenkin was more fortunate than some of his comrades.  He drew  in water-colour; not so badly as his father, yet ill enough; and  this art was so rare aboard the CONQUEROR that even his humble  proficiency marked him out and procured him some alleviations.   Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and here he  had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the historic  house.  One of these is before me as I write, and gives a strange  notion of the arts in our old English Navy.  Yet it was again as an  artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for  a second outing in a ten-gun brig.  These, and a cruise of six  weeks to windward of the island undertaken by the CONQUEROR herself  in quest of health, were the only breaks in three years of  murderous inaction; and at the end of that period Jenkin was  invalided home, having 'lost his health entirely.'

As he left the deck of the guard-ship the historic part of his  career came to an end.  For forty-two years he continued to serve  his country obscurely on the seas, sometimes thanked for  inconspicuous and honourable services, but denied any opportunity  of serious distinction.  He was first two years in the LARNE,  Captain Tait, hunting pirates and keeping a watch on the Turkish  and Greek squadrons in the Archipelago.  Captain Tait was a  favourite with Sir Thomas Maitland, High Commissioner of the Ionian  Islands - King Tom as he was called - who frequently took passage  in the LARNE.  King Tom knew every inch of the Mediterranean, and  was a terror to the officers of the watch.  He would come on deck  at night; and with his broad Scotch accent, 'Well, sir,' he would  say, 'what depth of water have ye?  Well now, sound; and ye'll just  find so or so many fathoms,' as the case might be; and the  obnoxious passenger was generally right.  On one occasion, as the  ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas came up the hatchway and cast  his eyes towards the gallows.  'Bangham' - Charles Jenkin heard him  say to his aide-de-camp, Lord Bangham - 'where the devil is that  other chap?  I left four fellows hanging there; now I can only see  three.  Mind there is another there to-morrow.'  And sure enough  there was another Greek dangling the next day.  'Captain Hamilton,  of the CAMBRIAN, kept the Greeks in order afloat,' writes my  author, 'and King Tom ashore.'

From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities  was in the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844,  now as a subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out  pirates, 'then very notorious' in the Leeward Islands, cruising  after slavers, or carrying dollars and provisions for the  Government.  While yet a midshipman, he accompanied Mr. Cockburn to  Caraccas and had a sight of Bolivar.  In the brigantine GRIFFON,  which he commanded in his last years in the West Indies, he carried  aid to Guadeloupe after the earthquake, and twice earned the thanks  of Government:  once for an expedition to Nicaragua to extort,  under threat of a blockade, proper apologies and a sum of money due  to certain British merchants; and once during an insurrection in  San Domingo, for the rescue of certain others from a perilous  imprisonment and the recovery of a 'chest of money' of which they  had been robbed.  Once, on the other hand, he earned his share of  public censure.  This was in 1837, when he commanded the ROMNEY  lying in the inner harbour of Havannah.  The ROMNEY was in no  proper sense a man-of-war; she was a slave-hulk, the bonded  warehouse of the Mixed Slave Commission; where negroes, captured  out of slavers under Spanish colours, were detained provisionally,  till the Commission should decide upon their case and either set  them free or bind them to apprenticeship.  To this ship, already an  eye-sore to the authorities, a Cuban slave made his escape.  The  position was invidious; on one side were the tradition of the  British flag and the state of public sentiment at home; on the  other, the certainty that if the slave were kept, the ROMNEY would  be ordered at once out of the harbour, and the object of the Mixed  Commission compromised.  Without consultation with any other  officer, Captain Jenkin (then lieutenant) returned the man to shore  and took the Captain-General's receipt.  Lord Palmerston approved  his course; but the zealots of the anti-slave trade movement (never  to be named without respect) were much dissatisfied; and thirty- nine years later, the matter was again canvassed in Parliament, and  Lord Palmerston and Captain Jenkin defended by Admiral Erskine in a  letter to the TIMES (March 13, 1876).

In 1845, while still lieutenant, Charles Jenkin acted as Admiral  Pigot's flag captain in the Cove of Cork, where there were some  thirty pennants; and about the same time, closed his career by an  act of personal bravery.  He had proceeded with his boats to the  help of a merchant vessel, whose cargo of combustibles had taken  fire and was smouldering under hatches; his sailors were in the  hold, where the fumes were already heavy, and Jenkin was on deck  directing operations, when he found his orders were no longer  answered from below:  he jumped down without hesitation and slung  up several insensible men with his own hand.  For this act, he  received a letter from the Lords of the Admiralty expressing a  sense of his gallantry; and pretty soon after was promoted  Commander, superseded, and could never again obtain employment.

In 1828 or 1829, Charles Jenkin was in the same watch with another  midshipman, Robert Colin Campbell Jackson, who introduced him to  his family in Jamaica.  The father, the Honourable Robert Jackson,  Custos Rotulorum of Kingston, came of a Yorkshire family, said to  be originally Scotch; and on the mother's side, counted kinship  with some of the Forbeses.  The mother was Susan Campbell, one of  the Campbells of Auchenbreck.  Her father Colin, a merchant in  Greenock, is said to have been the heir to both the estate and the  baronetcy; he claimed neither, which casts a doubt upon the fact,  but he had pride enough himself, and taught enough pride to his  family, for any station or descent in Christendom.  He had four  daughters.  One married an Edinburgh writer, as I have it on a  first account - a minister, according to another - a man at least  of reasonable station, but not good enough for the Campbells of  Auchenbreck; and the erring one was instantly discarded.  Another  married an actor of the name of Adcock, whom (as I receive the  tale) she had seen acting in a barn; but the phrase should perhaps  be regarded rather as a measure of the family annoyance, than a  mirror of the facts.  The marriage was not in itself unhappy;  Adcock was a gentleman by birth and made a good husband; the family  reasonably prospered, and one of the daughters married no less a  man than Clarkson Stanfield.  But by the father, and the two  remaining Miss Campbells, people of fierce passions and a truly  Highland pride, the derogation was bitterly resented.  For long the  sisters lived estranged then, Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Adcock were  reconciled for a moment, only to quarrel the more fiercely; the  name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her  sister's lips, until the morning when she announced:  'Mary Adcock  is dead; I saw her in her shroud last night.'  Second sight was  hereditary in the house; and sure enough, as I have it reported, on  that very night Mrs. Adcock had passed away.  Thus, of the four  daughters, two had, according to the idiotic notions of their  friends, disgraced themselves in marriage; the others supported the  honour of the family with a better grace, and married West Indian  magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never heard and would  not care to hear:  So strange a thing is this hereditary pride.  Of  Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's grandfather, I  know naught.  His wife, as I have said, was a woman of fierce  passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them  with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons,  was a mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane  violence of temper.  She had three sons and one daughter.  Two of  the sons went utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty.   The third went to India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly  from the knowledge of his relatives that he was thought to be long  dead.  Years later, when his sister was living in Genoa, a red- bearded man of great strength and stature, tanned by years in  India, and his hands covered with barbaric gems, entered the room  unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted her from her  seat, and kissed her.  It was her brother, suddenly returned out of  a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of  general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and  next his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he  had mixed blood.

The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla,  became the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the  subject of this notice, Fleeming Jenkin.  She was a woman of parts  and courage.  Not beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of  seeming so; played the part of a belle in society, while far  lovelier women were left unattended; and up to old age had much of  both the exigency and the charm that mark that character.  She drew  naturally, for she had no training, with unusual skill; and it was  from her, and not from the two naval artists, that Fleeming  inherited his eye and hand.  She played on the harp and sang with  something beyond the talent of an amateur.  At the age of  seventeen, she heard Pasta in Paris; flew up in a fire of youthful  enthusiasm; and the next morning, all alone and without  introduction, found her way into the presence of the PRIMA DONNA  and begged for lessons.  Pasta made her sing, kissed her when she  had done, and though she refused to be her mistress, placed her in  the hands of a friend.  Nor was this all, for when Pasta returned  to Paris, she sent for the girl (once at least) to test her  progress.  But Mrs. Jenkin's talents were not so remarkable as her  fortitude and strength of will; and it was in an art for which she  had no natural taste (the art of literature) that she appeared  before the public.  Her novels, though they attained and merited a  certain popularity both in France and England, are a measure only  of her courage.  They were a task, not a beloved task; they were  written for money in days of poverty, and they served their end.   In the least thing as well as in the greatest, in every province of  life as well as in her novels, she displayed the same capacity of  taking infinite pains, which descended to her son.  When she was  about forty (as near as her age was known) she lost her voice; set  herself at once to learn the piano, working eight hours a day; and  attained to such proficiency that her collaboration in chamber  music was courted by professionals.  And more than twenty years  later, the old lady might have been seen dauntlessly beginning the  study of Hebrew.  This is the more ethereal part of courage; nor  was she wanting in the more material.  Once when a neighbouring  groom, a married man, had seduced her maid, Mrs. Jenkin mounted her  horse, rode over to the stable entrance and horsewhipped the man  with her own hand.