Thomas Gordon Hake

“ It was in reflecting on the skill of such men that I always regarded surgery as a science far above all that physic can attain to.
Thomas Hodson is a name not to be forgotten. He loved his art passionately, and he would discourse on it with all the fervour it deserved. It is an art; but look at its foundation! The human frame is a transparency to the surgeon’s eyes. He is never in the dark, but sees his way clearly, with a perfect knowledge of what has to be done from first to last. It is otherwise with physic: the physician can fulfil certain indications, with certain remedies ”

“ I lingered at Florence for a month, looking at my favourite models of art, the chief of which now was the Perseus, by Cellini, and what I loved to linger over, never tiring, the Six Vestals, of Greek sculpture in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
But to dwell too long on such exquisite works of man’s genius almost infatuates; whilst gazing on a single object one seems to frame from memory an old and new testament of the inspired artists, and to call some of them evangelists, and some apostles. ”

“ The upshot of all this is, a poet is born to celebrate Nature, who is everlasting. He informs himself that nations fulfil only a given series of events, and that all concerning them, except their history and literature, is lost. He makes himself acquainted with the bulky circumstance that Greece and Rome were once as lively and self-confident as ourselves, as frivolous and as fashionable, but that in the midst of their greatness and their rubbish there were predestined poets; that Homer was one and Horace another, and that the legacy of their work is the only legacy they could leave us. ”

“ Mark’s is provokingly like the Pavilion at Brighton, only it is not Chinese but Byzantine.
The Doge’s palace, empty but full of reminiscences! Art there takes the place of old Reality: it laughs at the security of living queens and kings. St. Mark’s Square is like another and more charming Palais Royal; its arched windows soothe and fascinate the eyes.
There is a long, broad street in Venice—the Via Garibaldi. ”

“ Paolo is too magnificent for a church. It has a fine architectural pedigree up to Constantine, having endured all the horrors for generations of decay and fire, to be only rebuilt at greater cost than before.
I did not go on purpose to behold the church, but to almost adore the ancient cloisters at the back. The delicately twisted columns of the arches are so winning, they actually awake one’s affections; and if thinking of a thing ever after is love, they fill you with this fondest of recollections.
A good many of us rise in life. ”

“ From the Porta del Popolo to the Capitol is a line ending in a steep ascent, one of the seven hills, the Capitoline: this long street is the backbone of Rome, from which its ribs more or less radiate. It is not gigantic with a broad stride, like the Via Larga (now Cavoura) at Florence; it is not [272] beautiful, like the Genoese Via Nuova; it is more of a Bond Street, but a long one, with some fine buildings, and, as all long streets should be, it is cut in half by a good big square, the Piazza Colonna. Here we stumble against a column, look up, and for a minute or two we are in ancient Rome. ”

“ Italy and Germany have ceased to do so since they came into the enjoyment of freedom.
Science itself, now rampant, is but of an epoch. But, amid all this, religion is enduring.
Some will say, We now have the Press; that will maintain and resuscitate all that is good or beautiful! Not so; it is but of an epoch, and is already blasé. It does not lead; it only “follows the leader,” as in a game played by a child.
Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all. ”

“ All are so alike in actual importance among the so mighty things around, that were all who have lived, or are yet existing, to be arranged in a line, beginning with Shakespeare and Newton, Homer and Pythagoras, Phidias and Aristotle, Bacon, John Hunter and Goethe, followed by professors and students, labourers and mendicants, and ending with those who slobber while they talk,—and were the best made to stand forward in advance of the others in a degree proportioned to their excellence, the line of human beings, viewed at no great distance, would appear as straight as a ray of light. ”

“ In writing these memoirs, a love of my fellows has dominated my pen, as it does, always, in what I compose, for serious perusal. I am sometimes surprised at finding how this feeling keeps the upper hand, as, in the ordinary sense, it is not always deserved, nor always quite felt at starting: but it warms. As I began by saying, so I repeat, that, in a certain way, I am my own posterity; and, perhaps, I revive in myself the better feelings that a dead man would assuredly experience if he came suddenly to life. ”

“ To do this demands genius of the first order. Shakespeare, the most gifted of men, was not too great to employ it in his highest achievements. He was a perfect master of simplicity; he knew that there was but one simple thing, and that was truth.
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,” and the lines that follow, are entirely free from metaphor, yet no purer and nobler description ever found utterance. The more a writer deviates from simplicity, the less sincere he appears. Let every man of genius mark my words, that He who delivered the parables to the multitude was Sincerity itself ”

“ All these industries, like myself, go to Rome chiefly on their own business. But what a wonderful crowd there is flocking there to see all that is left—the fragments of Cæsar’s lost compositions.
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We business men, when we have found all we want, go the round; it is like walking through the street, looking at everybody, sometimes stopping to speak.
We meet a picture, a statue, a vase, an arch, a column, a palace, as we might do a friend; but those who undertake to see all might as well undertake to read the two or three billion letters that pass through the post-office in a year. ”

“ I have remarked on the strictly classical character of the school; but, after all, if one learns only one good thing well, one wishes to know others, and can teach one’s self. Then, classics have another advantage: Horace alone can make a gentleman. But what is more remarkable than all the other omissions in the school is, that the boys were never, individually, taught a word of religion. When it is remembered what a powerful influence the wealth of the clergy exercises, one must pause in wonder over the fact of religious teaching being a thing unknown. ”

“ Religion has its little hypocrites, so has irreligion: which of the two gives shelter to the largest number?
Whom do the benevolent intellects desire to teach? There are two classes for them to look down upon. The credulous are the happiest of the two and the best off; then why teach them to be incredulous, when there are millions for whom even their credulity is too good?
No one who has an acute mind should suppress his view of religious affairs, provided he is not offensive, because religion, though, like music, susceptible of variations, will survive all else, as it has ever done. ”

“ It takes two or three generations for the world to forget it when a great man kills himself.
“Life is a handsome present—no man earns it;
Ungracious therefore is he who returns it.”
I could never regard a suicide otherwise than as a very remarkable person, with inscrutable traits of character; in truth, as a singular anomaly. Napoleon, the most noticeable, perhaps, of men, because the worst among conspicuous ones, could not reach the courage to kill himself; bravery seems inadequate to such a purpose. ”

“ Rossetti was a sweet lady, and Christina, who still lives, a higher poet than her brother, is of the noblest brand. The family, one and all, are almost purely Italian. The father, a poet, was a Neapolitan; the mother was a Tuscan, with some Scotch blood. Rossetti may be regarded, not as English, but as one of those powerful leavens with which the genius of one country sometimes ferments that of another, to give it a new vitality. ”

“ So was it with the kindest of men, my best of friends, Sir David Scott, whose name and goodness deserve a better monument. So it was with Mr. Wagner, whose quick limbs and upright pleasant face appear to be moving through the streets of Brighton at this hour! I see him now rapidly turning the corner of Castle Square into the Old Steyne! Then comes back into view the rapid step of Horace Smith, another celebrity of the place, with a pun almost out of his mouth before we were within hearing of each other! They all seem still alive! ”

“ Sir Benjamin Brodie was a little man, thin of feature, with a diffused acuteness of look that rather [293] glowed because earnest. It demanded a good forehead, like his, and a clear eye to carry off this bright expression.
Dr. Chambers was a large, heavy man, with thick lips, full face, prompt though bulky, seeming to carry his advice in his whole body, and taking his fees as if he were relieving his patient.
John Nussey, the court apothecary, was a man who had the confidence of dukes. He was of large figure, doughy complexion, attentive manner: listening all over. ”

“ Leaving Paris in a dreadful diligence by way of Dijon and the golden grapes, I traversed the Jura range and entered Geneva. I stayed there too, for of course I had to set myself up in a musical box that played the “Parisienne” and the “Marseillaise,” as well as in a watch and chain, besides looking at Mont Blanc and sailing on the lake to see where the Rhone rushed in, and to visit Lausanne in memory of Gibbon. Nor did I fail to see the prison of Chillon in compliment to the poet Byron.
My jeweller at Geneva was a very earnest mechanic. ”

“ A Shakespeare, knowing and avowing himself to be a vehicle constructed of phosphorized brain and ozonized blood, through which the higher revelations of nature are poured out on the senses of men, might describe the glorious machinery as it worked within him; might declare himself to be the most highly perfected of human beings, and that without vanity or boast, but not without a benefit to others, affording them details concerning himself absolutely unattainable by ordinary means ”

“ One gets from calle to calle over the daintiest little bridges, some of white chiselled marble; from these you look up and down a canal between towering houses, and here and there see a family keep its gondola, as some of us at home keep our carriage. There the gondolas are tethered to the house steps, as our horses are to the manger.
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When there is no more walking possible, one takes to a gondola at the Piazzetta, which sweeps by palaces of loveliest architecture on both sides of the Grand Canal. ”

“ It is a useless fashion to bury the dead in red velvet, as a finish off to the oak, and the leaden coffins. However, all this cost is met out of the pockets of the dead, who can no longer manage their own affairs, and have all the appearance of bearing it with patient submission, whatever their last wish might be!
Lewes stands on a spur of the downs, the river Ouse runs at its base. Between this and the ascent, School Hill, a turning to the left leads to an adjoining village, Southover, deserving of mention, as once the seat of a monastery of historic interest. ”

“ Of course the time must come when the poetry of England is melted down and merged into an anthology, and it is probable that the “Sister Helen,” as being the strongest emotional poem, as yet, in the language, will be among the most lasting works, and escape dissolution for a long time to come; perhaps will survive all change. And here a very remarkable fact thrusts itself before the mind; a representative one, which is that if Rossetti had written not another line besides this poem, his genius would have appeared all the greater: for lesser work is a fatal commentary on greater. ”

“ But an event having happened which has put half the nation in mourning, and perhaps most of all our august sovereign herself, I feel impelled to utter a few words of sympathy on that sad occasion to her, the loss of a deserving Poet Laureate.
The time has come when the nation’s trust is no longer reposed in any party, but it is to be hoped that its confidence in the throne is unabated. It has taken centuries to produce a sovereign Power whose unbiased will has become moulded to the English idea of rule, and which is in perfect accord with the desires of our now vast numbers ”

“ Not many miles south was Seaford, a rotten borough, and, in the distance, Old Sarum, and this was more than the less prosperous inhabitants of Lewes could endure. They must have reform, and it came.
Like many individuals, they did not know when they were well off.
After having two baronets at their command, both with pigtails, they are no longer a parliamentary borough; even their ancient grammar school is turned into a commercial Academy, no longer a Plato at its head.
What need is there of eternal retribution when men are everlastingly punishing themselves? ”