Art. 13.-MRS HUGHES (OF UFFINGTON) AND HER CIRCLE.

Letters and Recollections of Sir Walter Scott. Edited by Horace G. Hutchinson. Smith, Elder, 1904.

SINCE the rediscovery of the Memoirs of the now immortal though once forgotten Mr Creevey, it is no longer possible to be surprised at the banishment from the page of history of any name that was of contemporary note; but, if there were still scope for such astonishment, it might well be devoted to the personality of a lady, Mrs Hughes (of Uffington, as they were wont to call her), who was the centre for a good many years of a rather brilliant literary circle.

If you will look in the Dictionary of National Biography you may read that Hughes, John (1790-1857), author, born 2nd January, 1790, was the only son of Thomas Hughes, D.D., clerk of the closet to George III and George IV, Vicar of Uffington, Berkshire, and Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, by his wife, Mary Anne, daughter of the Rev. George Watts, Vicar of Uffington.' This John Hughes, the son, wrote 'An Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone,' highly commended by Sir Walter Scott in his Preface to Quentin Durward,' besides many other trifles of literature which are seldom read; and, if you wish a further account of him, you may study the character of the Squire, as portrayed by Thomas Hughes in 'Tom Brown's Schooldays;' for the author of that best of school books was one of John Hughes's numerous family, and it was largely from his father that he sketched the Squire's character.

In an introduction contributed to the collection placed at the head of this article, Mr W. H. Hughes, her grandson, says of this lady:

'She was born about 1770 at Uffington, a little village two miles north of King Alfred's White Horse Hill, in the "royal county of Berks," the only child of the last of a line of clergymen who had, for several generations, succeeded one another in the cure of souls at that little place. One of these parsons [he was Master of the Temple], whose ministry fell in the time of George II, must have been well known as a preacher in his day, for he was appointed one of the chaplains whose

duty it was, from time to time, to preach in the Chapel Royal. He was not, however, called upon for a second sermon in that capacity; for (the King attending the service in doubtful company) he took the seventh commandment as the subject of his first discourse, and as his text, "Thou art the man."

'With such forbears, it is perhaps natural that Mary Anne Watts was markedly independent and fearless; also that, not being able to hold the family living in her own right, she should manage to attain to it through the Rev. Thomas Hughes, D.D., whom she married when she was still quite young, and he verging on middle age. She had no difficulty, it may be supposed, in inducing the clergyman who had now become Vicar of her paternal parish to exchange that living for the much more valuable one which her husband held, in virtue of his canonry of St Paul's Cathedral, the reward of his earnest endeavours to bring up the younger sons of George III as Christian gentlemen. And so a great part of every year was spent at the Uffington parsonage by the Canon and his wife, she continuing the benevolent despotism begun by her there in the days of her father.'

Amongst the varied gifts of this remarkable lady was a beautiful and cultivated voice. Her grandson records that she brought tears to the eyes of Sir Walter Scott and her other friends by her rendering of the old English and Scotch ballads.' Her introduction to the 'Wizard of the North' is related in her own diary, and is curious enough to be worth transcribing. The Mrs Hayman referred to was a Lady-in-Waiting to the ill-fated Princess Caroline of Wales, and though complimented, after the manner of the day, with the title of Mrs,' was a spinster.

'My first introduction to Sir Walter Scott,' says Mrs Hughes, was given me by my friend, Mrs Hayman, in the year 1806, when Sir W. S. was in town enjoying his first fame after the publication of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

'Queen Caroline invited him, immediately on his arrival in the Metropolis, to visit her at Blackheath; by which means he became intimately acquainted with Mrs Hayman, who was a very superior person both in intellect and information, and singularly agreeable. When not in immediate attendance on the Queen, Mrs Hayman lodged in Berkeley Square. Behind her house there was a mews, which opened into Hay Hill, at the entrance of which mews I always saw a half-starved dog-a facsimile of that in Hogarth's 6th print. I had such

a feeling of compassion for the poor, forlorn, half-starved creature, that I always carried in my muff a parcel of bones in a newspaper for him, and, as I visited Mrs Hayman generally twice a week, the dog was by my gifts kept alive. His gratitude was extreme; I always found him watching for me, and his expression of delight on seeing me is not to be described; but my friend Mrs Hayman, whose only fault was a dislike to dogs, always quizzed me unmercifully, and told everybody to whom she introduced me of my folly and greasiness, as she called it.

'On the morning when I went to meet Sir Walter Scott he had arrived and was sitting with her, and immediately on my entrance, she cried out, “Well! have you been pampering your nasty, mangy cur!" and when I answered in the affirmative, she turned to Sir Walter and said, "I don't know, Mr Scott, whether you will thank me for the introduction, unless she wins you over by her singing, but I must tell you that this simpleton lives in the cloisters of Westminster and comes twice or thrice a week, bringing with her a parcel of dirty bones, with which she fills her nice new muff, for a nasty half-starved cur, and feeds the creature with them." He made no reply for a minute or two, but leaned back in his chair, gazing hard at me under his shaggy brows, but with the most benevolent smile-then thrusting out his hand, he caught hold of mine with a grip which I can only compare to a blacksmith's vice, exclaiming, "You and I must be friends!" which, during his remaining life, he verified.'

From all the accounts that we can gather of Dr Hughes and his talented wife we may draw the inference that hers was the more vital and vigorous, as it was by many years the younger, spirit. He is represented to us as a very worthy divine, most kindly of heart and of solid but not exceptionally brilliant intellect. The lady's correspondents sent their compliments to the husband, but it was merely as preface or postscript to letters of which the body was for her. Fellow Canons of St Paul's with Dr Hughes were Sydney Smith and Richard Barham, the latter better known by his pen name of 'Thomas Ingoldsby.' At Amen Corner,

'during the canonical part of the year,' writes Mr Hughes, 'with such a good foundation as her husband and his colleagues, she came as near holding a "salon" as was possible in the smoky surroundings of St Paul's Churchyard in the early part of last century. She sang, as I have said, very

charmingly, told stories in such a way as to have them worked into his novels by Scott and into his "Legends" by Barham, and drew about her many other men distinguished in the work of letters, art and music who valued sprightly talk and genial ways.'

It was not, however, until 1831 that Sydney Smith was appointed to St Paul's; and, seeing that Dr Hughes died in 1833 and that Mrs Hughes then retired to the country, it was only for a very short time that the witty Canon was a member of the literary circle of which Mrs Hughes was in some sort the centre. Barham's diary of Oct. 2, 1831, has the note:-Rev. Sydney Smith read himself in as Residentiary at St Paul's: dined with him afterwards at Dr Hughes's.' Barham's association with the Cathedral dated from 1821, when he was appointed to a minor canonry; and, until 1833, Mrs Hughes was the constant and unfailing inspiration of his singular genius. Barham was very conscious of the gift he owed her and was always willing and even anxious to admit it. In the copy of the Legends which he sent to Mrs Hughes, after their collection into a volume, he wrote the characteristic jingle:

'To Mrs Hughes, who made me do 'em,

Quod placeo est-si placeo-tuum.'

And, adds Mr Barham the younger, who wrote his father's biography, the distich . . . conveys no more than the actual fact.'

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'Mrs Hughes,' he writes, even at the time of my father's introduction to her, was a lady well advanced in years' [as a matter of fact she was some eighteen years older than 'Ingoldsby'] but possessed of a surprising activity of mind and body, an excellent memory, and a knowledge of what may be called the curiosities of county history unequalled so far as my experience goes.'

Mr Barham might have added that everything in the nature of a 'ghost story' made a very warm appeal to the good lady's heart. Just what measure of belief she accorded to these stories is not so manifest. Mrs Hughes, however, had a remarkably strong and shrewd understanding, and we may conjecture that in her generation Vol. 226.-No. 449. 20

the bent of her mind was rather to scepticism than to credulity. But another motive likely to influence her attitude, real or assumed, towards these tales of supernatural wonder, was her love of anecdote. Obviously she was a gifted raconteuse, whether orally or by letters, and she was too good an artist to neglect the assistance which the supernatural element can lend to the interest of a narrative. At all events, it is easy to see, in the warm friendship of 'Ingoldsby' for Mrs Hughes and in her stores of county lore, both of the gossipy and the ghostly kind, the making of those Legends which Barham's extraordinary faculty for rhyme, and his success in catching the spirit of the French conte, have made immortal. His son, indeed, admits a larger debt even than this, saying:

'To her he' (that is, his father) was indebted not only for a large proportion of the legendary lore which forms the groundwork of the "Ingoldsby" poems, but also for the application of a stimulus that induced him to complete many papers which diffidence, or that aptitude, previously spoken of, to turn aside at the faintest suspicion of a lion in the way," would have left unfinished.'

Manifestly it is not too much to say, that but for Mrs Hughes we might have had no Legends,' no 'Ingoldsby' at all. Nor, as the younger Barham also confesses, would his memoir of his father, in which the greater number, and the best, of the letters are addressed to Mrs Hughes, ever have been written but for her help and encouragement. Had Dr Hughes lived for another decade in enjoyment of the canonry at St Paul's, it is likely that we should not have had any of this correspondence. In that case Canon Barham would have been meeting Mrs Hughes constantly in the precincts of St Paul's, and there would have been less occasion to exchange friendly sentiments and humorous comment and anecdote in writing; but, when she finally retired, after the Doctor's death, to Uffington, the friendship was maintained by the long letters that were habitual with those to whom franks' were precious.

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Among the lady's talents, that of providing 'good cheer,' in the form of dainties for the table, was conspicuous; and from Berkshire she would send up to her