206 PRÆTERITA-I

232. I have above noticed¹ the farther and incalculable good it was to me that Acland took me up in my first and foolishest days, and with pretty irony and loving insight,-or, rather, sympathy with what was best, and blindness to what was worst in me,-gave me the good of seeing a noble young English life in its purity, sagacity, honour, reckless daring, and happy piety; its English pride shining prettily through all, like a girl’s in her beauty. It is extremely interesting to me to contrast the Englishman’s silently conscious pride in what he is, with the vexed restlessness and wretchedness of the Frenchman, in his thirst for “gloire,” to be gained by agonized effort to become something he is not.

One day when the Cherwell was running deep over one of its most slippery weirs, question rising between Acland and me whether it were traversable, and I declaring it too positively to be impassable, Acland instantly took off boot and sock, and walked over and back. He ran no risk but of a sound ducking, being, of course, a strong swimmer: and I suppose him wise enough not to have done it had there been real danger. But he would certainly have run the margin fine, and possessed in its quite highest, and in a certain sense, most laughable degree, the constitutional English serenity in danger, which, with the foolish of us, degenerates into delight in it, but with the wise, whether soldier or physician, is the basis of the most fortunate action and swiftest decision of deliberate skill. When, thirty years afterwards, Dr. Acland was wrecked in the steamer Tyne,² off the coast of Dorset, the steamer having lain wedged on the rocks all night,-no one knew what rocks,-and the dawn breaking on half a mile of dangerous surf between the ship and shore-the officers, in anxious debate, the crew, in confusion, the passengers, in

¹ [See p. 197.]

² [A steamer belonging to the West India Mail Company, homeward bound from Rio Janeiro. She was ashore on January 10, 1857; the incident, therefore, was not “thirty” but twenty “years afterwards.” For further account of the incident, see J. B. Atlay’s Memoir of Sir Henry Acland, pp. 235-236.]

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