Ooiobsr 20, 1850.] ROBERT STEPHENSON. 371
any difficulties which might have arisen, than for the friendly and intellectual intercourse to which they gave rise, from which none were excluded, from the highest to the lowest.
Like all truly great minds, and we may add, like his father before him, he of whom we write was eminently unselfish and free from profes- sional jealousy. He aided, most freely and
most cheerfully, his fellow -labourers in the great human cause of taming the elements and of reduc- ing nature to obedience to the ways and wills of mankind. To mention no other instance, the public at large are well aware that the aid ren- dered to him by his friend Brunei in the construc- tion of the Menai tubular bridge was gratefully repaid by counsel and advice in the launching out of the Great Eastern.
We will not weary our readers by recording here the long list of learned societies that counted Robert Stephenson among their members: it will be sufficient to say that the Great Exhibition of 1851, the London Sanitary and Sewerage Com- mission, the Institute of Civil Engineers, and the Royal Society, all reaped in their turn the benefits of his clear head, his sound professional know- ledge, and his willing and zealous co-operation.
As our readers are aware, he represented the sea-port of Whitby in the Conservative interest for the last ten or twelve years of his life. As a member of “the House,” he did not take any active part in questions of a purely political cha- racter; and he was of too large a mind and too liberal a nature to allow himself to be shackled by the ties of party. He was no orator, nor did he pretend to what he was not; but upon such sub- jects as were fairly within his ken and his grasp, he spoke with a sound sense and shrewdness, and with an honest integrity, which always secured for him a respectful attention in that most fastidious of all audiences — St. Stephen’s. Upon the much debated questions of the Suez Canal Scheme, the Thames Embankment, Metropolitan Drainage, the Purification of the Serpentine, and the Construc- tion of Metropolitan Railways, there was no one to whom “the ear of the house ” was more readily accorded.
If there and elsewhere he will be heard no more, and the loss of his counsels may be esteemed a national loss in the deepest sense, there is yet another sense in which he will be regretted more widely than most men who have had equal opportunities of inter- course with society. Here he was simply charming and fascinating in the highest degree, from his natural goodness of heart and the genial zest with which he relished life himself and participated its enjoy- ment with others. He was generous and even princely in his expenditure— not upon himself but on his friends — and his love of the English pas- time of yachting amounted almost to a passion. On board the “Titania,” or at his house in Gloucester Square, his frequent and numerous guests found his splendid resources at all times converted to their gratification with a grace of hos- pitality which, although sedulous, was never oppressive. There was nothing of the patron in his manner, or of the Olympic condescension which is sometimes affected by much lesser men. A friend (and how many friends he had!) was at
once his equal and treated with republican free- dom, yet with the most high-bred courtesy and happy considerateness. We may doubt whether any of the celebrated reception-houses of our aristocracy ever afforded more delightful gather- ings than those with which Stephenson’s ex- pansive tastes surrounded him in his fiome.
Men of science, letters, art, great travellers, engineers, young and old of both sexes, and of varied accomplishments, gave to his reunions a completeness the more striking that it seemed never to be anxiously aimed at. Surrounded by his choice collection of modern works of art, or explaining his philosophical apparatus, or battling some scientific thesis, or exchanging some sprightly banter in asocial circle, the image of Robert Stephen- son will rise up before his friends as a pillar bearing the record of some of their happiest hours. What a favourite he was with all, especially with women and young persons I No one who enjoyed his intimacy can forget the easy and familiar manner in which he was accustomed to enlarge on interesting but abstruse points of natural philo- sophy; but to ladies, and the young espe- cially, he made a point of explaining everything with more than usual care and definiteness, never quitting the subject until he was satisfied that he had been perfectly understood. Nor was his natural benevolence exemplified in the social sphere only. Accessible almost to a fault, he never turned a deaf ear to the applications for counsel and assistance so constantly poured in upon him. Nor was his kindness to his fellow men more remarkable than his strong detestation of cruelty to animals. Those who knew him well will remember with pleasure this trait of true gentleness. It mattered not to him what was the occasion, or what the apparent reason for haste, but he never would suffer the horses in any of the vehicles under his control to be ill-used.
As readily he oould waive his private gratification for the public good; as for example, when it was desired to ascertain some facts of a scientific nature with regard to Teneriffe, he at once put his yacht and crew at the disposal of the parties to whom the mission was confided, and refused all reim- bursement of his liberal expenditure. His payment of half the debt of 6000J. , which weighed like an incubus on an Institution at Newcastle, is generally known; but his private charities were as boundless as his nature was generous, and as quietly per- formed as that nature was unostentatious.
Such, then, was Robert Stephenson, lotus teres clique rotundus , as complete a character in the multifarious relations of life as probably any man has met or will meet in the course of his experience.
Not unlike, or rather exceedingly like, his father in some respects, especially in the easy unimposing manner in which he went about his life’s work, he was hardly to be accounted his father’s inferior, except perhaps in the heroic quality of combative- ness. Father and son, independently of each other, and both in conjunction, have left grand and bene- ficent results to posterity, and both recal to us Monckton Milnes’s men of old, who
Went about their gravest tasks
Like noble boys at play.