ngs in the neighbourhood of that very Beverley, where
I spent perhaps the happiest half-year of my life--half a year of
tranquil, studious days, far from the madding crowd, with the mother
whose society was always all sufficient for me--half a year among level
pastures, with unlimited books from the library in Hull, an old
farm-horse to ride about the green lanes, the breath of summer, with all
its sweet odours of flower and herb, around and about us; half a year of
unalloyed bliss, had it not been for one dark shadow, the heroic figure
of Garibaldi, the sailor-soldier, looming large upon the foreground of
my literary labours, as the hero of a lengthy narrative poem in the
Spenserian metre.

[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S FAVOURITE MARE]

My chief business at Beverley was to complete the volume of verse
commissioned by my Yorkshire Maecenas, at that time a very rich man, who
paid me a much better price for my literary work than his townsman, the
enterprising printer, and who had the first claim on my thought and
time.

[Illustration: THE ORANGERY]

With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, I went every
morning to my file of the _Times_, and pored and puzzled over Neapolitan
revolution and Sicilian campaign, and I can only say that if Emile Zola
has suffered as much over Sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my
youth, when flowery meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer
idlesse, over the fighting in Sicily, his dogged perseverance in
uncongenial labour should place him among the Immortal Forty. How I
hated the great Joseph G. and the Spenserian metre, with its exacting
demands upon the rhyming faculty! How I hated my own ignorance of modern
Italian history, and my own eyes for never having looked upon Italian
landscape, whereby historical allusion and local colour were both
wanting to that dry-as-dust record of heroic endeavour! I had only the
_Times_ correspondent; where he was picturesque I could be
picturesque--allowing always for the Spenserian straining--where he was
rich in local colour I did my utmost to reproduce his colouring,
stretched always on the Spenserian rack, and lengthened out by the
bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes. Next to Giuseppe Garibaldi I
hated Edmund Spenser, and it may be from a vengeful remembrance of those
early struggles with a difficult form of versification, that, although
throughout my literary life I have been a lover of England's earlier
poets, a