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The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎39v] (83/244)

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The record is made up of 1 volume (120 folios). It was created in Apr 1892. It was written in English. The original is part of the British Library: India Office The department of the British Government to which the Government of India reported between 1858 and 1947. The successor to the Court of Directors. Records and Private Papers Documents collected in a private capacity. .

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568
THE NINETEENTH
April
Our real acquaintance, however, and friendship were not to begin
till five years later. In the interval he had married, most happily as
the world knows, and indeed his marriage proved to him the one
great unchanging blessing of his life. He had now an assured posi
tion, for his father had been obliged to make him a proper settlement,
and he had risen to the rank of Secretary, or, as we should now say,
First Secretary of Legation, and was temporarily in charge of the
Mission at Lisbon. It was perhaps the happiest time of his life—
certainly that of his greatest poetical activity, and politics had not
yet begun to engross him. I will try and recall the exact circum
stances of this our second and more eventful meeting. It was in the
month of August 1865. I had been sent to Lisbon in a kind of
disgrace from Paris, having been banished by the paternal care of
Lord Hammond, then omnipotent at the Foreign Office, from that
city of delights, where I had lived not wisely but too well, to what I
considered a terrible and undeserved exile at Lisbon. I was miserably
unhappy about this and about other circumstances of my life, which
need not here be explained, and stood, in fact, just at that parting of
the ways in youth where a little sympathy, more or less, of a certain
kind means a whole world of difference in its choice of a road—on this
side to salvation, on that to perdition. Lisbon is the mournfullest,
as well as the most beautiful of grass-grown cities, and on landing
there in the burning heat of summer, my spirits had sunk to their
lowest point of depression. I found the Legation deserted, the
minister in England on leave, and no one to receive me at my new
post but the Chancery servant. I was the only and my only
colleague, Mr. Lytton, was living in Villegiatura, he told me, away
in the hills at Cintra. I took a ramshackle hack carriage and set
out to find him; and, as we toiled up the dusty road in the after
noon sun to where Cintra lies perched beneath the eagle's nest of the
Pena, my misery seemed to have reached its full. Weary and dis
pirited I fell asleep in the carriage. I shall never forget the sensation
of waking in the cool mist at the top of the pass, or the sweet fresh
smell of the cork woods dripping with rain as we stopped at the door
of the little country inn (kept by an ancient Welsh landlady, once
bumboat woman to the fleet) in which Lytton had established himself
in solitude for the summer. He ran out to meet me as soon as I
was announced, and with that prodigality of affectionate kindness
which was so great a charm in him, welcomed me in. I had hardly
been half an hour with him before I felt that, like the pilgrim to the
Delectable Mountains, the burden of my sins was falling from my
back, and that I had found a guide and friend to show me a way out
of my misfortunes. And so in truth it proved. All that evening,
and till late into the night, we sat talking of things divine, poetry,
philosophy, and sentiment, and many an evening afterwards, till the
hours grew small and the candles burned low in their sockets, and a

About this item

Content

The file contains a copy of the journal The Nineteenth Century. A pencil note on the cover of the journal, in the hand of Lady Pelly, indicates that Lewis Pelly was being read an article from this journal on Easter Sunday five days before he died.

The article he and his wife were reading has been marked on the cover 'Prospects of Marriage for Women, by Miss Clara E Collet' which appears on folios 24-31.

A second annotation, written by Sir William Henry Rhodes Green, gives the date of Lewis Pelly's death and is provided as context to Lady Pelly's comments.

Extent and format
1 volume (120 folios)
Physical characteristics

The journal contains one set of foliation and three sets of original pagination.

The principal foliation for this volume appears in the top right hand corner of the recto The front of a sheet of paper or leaf, often abbreviated to 'r'. of each folio, using a pencil number enclosed with a circle.

The three sets of original printed pagination that appear are as follows:

The advertisments at the front of the journal are paginated as i-xxxii; the articles themselves are paginated as 525-712; and the Sampson Low, Marston & Company publications list at the rear of the journal has been paginated as 1-8.

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English in Latin script
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The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎39v] (83/244), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, Mss Eur F126/28, in Qatar Digital Library <https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023318122.0x000054> [accessed 29 March 2024]

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