than these terrible words, “Poor insane coward!”—Darwin, who, shortly before his death, when his wife, trembling at his coming doom, wept at the thought of their approaching separation, had nothing better to console her with than to bid her to remember “that she was the wife of a philosopher.” And there were canons, and prebends, and rectors, and choral vicars; some of the jovial, careless crew; others just merely touched with the putrescent philosophy of Day and Darwin, as Lovell Edgeworth was; others cherishing it. Some were holy; most were indifferent. There was also another light which scattered its beams even on the old panelled chambers of the episcopal palace itself. There, tending an aged father, sat Anna Seward, and there, by her side, growing up to loveliness and intelligence, Honora Sneyd was planted.
For successive generations the Sneyds of Staffordshire have been remarkable for personal beauty. The classic features, the fair hair, the matchless complexion, were seen in the person of a collateral descendant of this family stock in Paris, when all the Tuileries was in a blaze as one of the loveliest of faces was observed amid a crowd of less fair physiognomies in the Salle des Marechaux. The sudden empressement of a personage highly placed; the envy of surrounding mothers; the quick Spanish jealousy of one less fair, yet more interesting, than la belle; the tale of fruitless admiration; the erasure of that one name from the court list—are they not written, if not in the chronicles, in the memory of all who passed the winter of 1853 in Paris? Honora Sneyd, the beloved of the ill-fated André, had been placed by her father, a widower, with Miss Seward, not only for education, but to be introduced to society. She possessed, that loving preceptress has recorded, “all the graces.” Happily she was not too strong-minded. She was intellectual, sincere in character, and fascinating in conversation. Parental authority had dissolved an early engagement between her and Major André. He was fighting, with her image in his heart, in America, when Mr. Day arrived at Stowe Vale, and became one of the coterie around Anna Seward.
Mr. Day soon yielded to the charms which seem to have captivated all who approached Honora. He offered her his hand. She refused it,—but the refusal was softened by her assuring him that she wished she could love him. She even owned she had tried to do so, but she could not school her heart to the stern effort. Day then turned his attention towards Elizabeth, the pretty, artless, lively younger sister of Honora. “Countless degrees,” Miss Seward tells us, “inferior to the endowed and adorned Honora,” Elizabeth’s answer was more propitious than that of her sister. Had Mr. Day’s manner and address been less singular she could, she believed, have even loved him. But he was so unlike all the world; he was so eccentric, so austere, so uncompromising!
Day laid the lesson to his heart, and then set off to Paris to be modelled into a gentleman. He gave himself up to dancing and fencing masters. He stood for an hour or two a day in frames and back-boards; he screwed back his shoulders, though not inflicted with a Colonel Bentinck, to enforce the agony. He learned to point his toes, he assumed the military gait, he practised the fashionable bow, and came out in minuets and cotillons. He then hastened back to Lichfield and Elizabeth Sneyd, telling her that he was no longer Thomas Day, “blackguard,” but Thomas Day, “fine gentleman.”
But alas! the philosopher was spoiled, and the fine gentleman was a mere caricature, and Elizabeth, even Elizabeth, shrank back at his addresses. Three years afterwards, Honora married the young widower, Mr. Edgeworth, and, at her death, Elizabeth became her sister’s successor, and the third wife of that clever, desultory, garrulous man. So there closed Day’s hopes, as far as the lovely Sneyds were concerned. Meantime, Mr. Day had been carrying on his experiments on the hapless little Sabrina. She was to be formed on the model of Arria, or of Portia, or Cornelia; she was never to shrink from pain. On this principle her benefactor dropped scalding sealing-wax on her arms, and was scandalised to see her weep. He fired pistols at her petticoats, and she screamed. When he told her of invented danger to himself, and made her understand that his confidence was of the utmost moment, he found that she could not keep the secret, but let out these fictitious conspiracies to her playfellows. Then Day was in despair, but still more so when it became obvious that Sabrina could never, would never, endure study, nor attain that intellectual prowess that would become the mother of the Gracchi. And, meantime, all the faults of this benighted capacity were daily and hourly contrasted with the ready apprehension, the progressing mind, the sensibility, the companionableness of the beautiful Honora and the engaging Elizabeth Sneyd. Has not Madame Charles Reybaud, in her “Deux Marguérites,” consciously or unconsciously drawn the portraiture of Thomas Day, and illustrated by that beautiful story the error of his life? Be this, however, as it may, she has painted admirably the impossibility of raising an uneducated and common mind to the standard of one improved by training, and gifted by nature. At all events the process must begin early, almost in infancy, besides which there is something in race.
Miss Edgeworth has depicted, it is allowed, Day’s opinions and manners in her “Forester,” but she has touched her portrait with a too restraining hand. Either Day’s nature was hardened by his principles, or his nature assimilated too readily with his unnatural and impracticable convictions. There is a want of social chivalry in his conduct to Sabrina, and we peruse the unrefuted statements of Miss Seward with regret.
After firing at her petticoats and dropping sealing-wax on her arms for a year, our philosopher found that his experiments were failures. Sabrina began to fear him exceedingly. Did the poor helpless foundling sometimes conjecture why she was thus adopted, flurried, maintained, and persecuted by her self-appointed guardian? Did her girlish heart yearn in wistful fancy to the dim image of her lost, her unknown parents, with a yearning for something less philosophical and more tender than the training process of Thomas Day?