VI. THE CAMPO SANTO 343
have never seen a fillet of veal rightly roasted, nor a Yorkshire pudding rightly basted, since Mary Stone left us to be married in 1836. Elizabeth, also not to be excelled in her line, was yet replaceable, when her career ended in the same catastrophe, by a third younger sister, Hannah; but I can’t in the least remember who waited on us, till our perennial parlour-maid, Lucy Tovey, came to us in 1829-remaining with us till 1875. Her sister Harriet replaced Hannah Stone, who must needs be married, like Mary and Elizabeth, in 1834; nor did she leave us till the Denmark Hill household was broken up.1 But in 1842 another young housemaid came, Anne Hobbs,2 whose brother John Hobbs, called always at Denmark Hill, George, to distinguish him, in vocal summons, from my father and me, became my body servant in the same year, and only left me to push his higher fortune in 1854.3 I could not say before, without interrupting graver matters, that the idea of my not being able to dress myself began at Oxford, where it was thought becoming in a gentleman-commoner to have a squire to manage his scout. My good, honest, uninteresting Thomas Hughes, being vigilant that I put my waistcoat on right side outwards, went abroad with us, instead of Salvador; my father, after the first two journeys, being quite able to do his courier’s work himself. When we came home in ’42, Hughes wanted to promote himself to some honour or other in the public-house line, and George Hobbs, a sensible and merry-minded youth of eighteen, came in his stead. Couttet and he sat in the back seat of the light-hooded barouche which I took for this Italian journey; the hood seldom raised, as I never travelled in bad weather unless surprised by it; and the three of us walked that April morning up the
1 [It was Harriet and Lucy Tovey whom Ruskin installed in the management of his model tea-shop: see Vol. XXVIII. pp. xviii., 204, 661.]
2 [Daughter of Anne Stone (Mrs. Hobbes, as the name should be spelt), who had been with the family from 1821 to 1824. Anne Hobbes became maid to Ruskin’s mother, and married Mr. George Allen in 1856.]
3 [He went to Australia, became a J.P., a Police Magistrate, and member of the Lands Department in New South Wales. He died in 1892.]
[Version 0.04: March 2008]