Langham, to which Marryat betook himself for good in 1843, had been in his possession for some thirteen years. Its history, as far as he was concerned, may be taken to have been characteristic of the man. He acquired it, according to Mrs. Ross Church, by exchange—having “swapped” it, after dinner and copious champagne, against Sussex House, Hammersmith. From that period it had been an interesting but unprofitable possession to him. Before he left for America he had already had occasion to complain of the difficulty of getting rent. A tenant had been expelled, and replaced by another of the fairest character. But appearances had proved delusive. Langham had been all along more of a burden than a profit to its owner. In 1843 he seems to have decided to see what he could do with it himself. A passage in his fragmentary life of Lord Napier, quoted by his daughter, shows that he shared to the full the common delusion of men, and the especial delusion of sailors, that it is easy to manage a small property. In this pleasing but fatal belief he set out to see what he could do with the 700 acres of the estate himself. Again I have to acknowledge my inability to[133] give any account of the motives for this sudden (for it appears to have been sudden) decision. Considerations of economy were doubtless of weight with him. The fall in the value of West Indian property had, as has been said, hit him hard. The demands on his purse were as heavy as ever—indeed, to judge from a somewhat plaintive reference in one of his letters—even heavier. He speaks in this place of actions brought by tradesmen to recover money for goods supplied to his sons Frederick and Frank—from which we may conclude that the young men had inherited their share of the paternal faculty for spending money. Their father was driven to express the wish that the value of this necessary was taught in schools. Neither at school nor at home do the young Marryats appear to have gained this knowledge, and in those years the navy, which they had both entered, was no school of thrift. Doubtless they were among the causes which first induced Captain Marryat to betake himself to the country, and then kept him hard at work when he was there.

Langham is in the northern division of Norfolk, halfway between Wells-next-the-Sea and Holt. The Manor House, says Mrs. Ross Church, “without having any great architectural pretensions, had a certain unconventional prettiness of its own. It was a cottage in the Elizabethan style, built after the model of one at Virginia Water belonging to his late Majesty, George IV., with latticed windows opening on to flights of stone steps ornamented with vases of flowers, and leading down from the long narrow dining-room, where (surrounded by Clarkson Stanfield’s illustrations of ‘Poor Jack,’ with[134] which the walls were clothed) Captain Marryat composed his later works, to the lawn behind. The house was thatched and gabled, and its pinkish white walls and round porch were covered with roses and ivy, which in some parts climbed as high as the roof itself.” When Marryat came down to examine his property with an intention of living on it, he found it suffering from all the evils which commonly fall upon the property of absentee landlords. The tenant of the larger of the two farms into which the estate was divided had not only mismanaged his land. Having the house itself at his mercy, he had turned the drawing-room into a common lodging-house, in which tramps and other necessitous persons could have a bed for the modest sum of twopence a night. The windows were smashed or unclosed, and the birds of the air had built their nests in the rooms. This state of neglect was soon changed for the better, and Langham Manor became habitable.

In it Marryat sat down during the last five years of his life, to show in practice the soundness of his theory touching the fitness of sailors for the management of small properties. It will surprise few to learn that the result only proved once more that small properties are not so easily forced to yield a profit. Even before actually coming to live on the estate, Marryat had tried various speculations with his land. The results of his efforts, personal and vicarious, are illustrated in his daughter’s “Life” by the following extracts, taken at random from his farm accounts.

[135]
        ￡     s.     d.
1842.     Total receipts     154     2     9
    Expenditure     1637     0     6
1846.     Total receipts     898     12     6
    Expenditure     2023     10     8

It will be seen that the balance was less heavily against Marryat in ’46 when he was present, than in ’42 when he could only look on from afar. Even in these cases the master’s eye is of value. It is better to lose on your own ventures than to be robbed all round, and in so far Marryat no doubt gained by living on his land. In 1845 he even secured some compensation for the damage done to his house and property by the dishonest tenant—at least the courts decided that compensation should be paid him. After a lawsuit, an unsuccessful effort at compromise, and (Marryat declares) much hard swearing by his opponent, he was awarded ￡150. Whether he ever got it is a question, for the tenant seems to have been meditating bankruptcy immediately afterwards. The end of the business is wrapt up in mystery. On the whole, one can quite believe that the Captain’s “agricultural vagaries appeared almost like insanity to those steady plodding minds that could not understand that a man may have genius, and no common sense.” Quite credible, too, is it that Marryat was very particularly proud of his common sense, and “would have been very much hurt” if any man had doubted his claim to possess it in an eminent degree. If there is anything of which the more flighty kind of speculator is firmly persuaded,[136] it is of his practical faculty and sober good sense. It is very characteristic that in all Marryat’s stories for children, and in touches scattered over his earlier works, there are proofs of a taste for thinking about matters of business, and for constructing plausible narratives of profitable investments of money and labour. It would seem that, among writing men (and not among them only) this taste is an infallible sign of a natural incapacity to acquire three pennyworth of anything for less than eighteen pence. Balzac had it, and he never could keep his fingers off a losing speculation. Marryat is so exact about sums of money, and has such a turn for showing how profits are to be made, that we are quite prepared to hear of him bursting into his brother’s room at 3 o’clock a.m., with splendid schemes for draining the marshes of Clay-by-the-Sea, and thereby realizing wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. It follows as a matter of course that his only surviving son, Frank, found Langham a worthless inheritance.

It is at this period of his life that we can obtain the best, and, indeed, almost the only personal view of Marryat. Of the last years of his life at Langham, Mrs. Ross Church speaks from memory, and her evidence has independent support. The picture we obtain is in the main pleasant, though it is sufficiently clear that Marryat was not exactly an angel. “Many people,” says his daughter, “have asked whether Captain Marryat, when at home, was not ‘very funny.’ No, decidedly not. In society, with new topics to discuss, and other wits about him on which to sharpen his own—or, like flint and steel, to emit sparks by friction—he was as gay and humorous[137] as the best of them; but at home he was always a thoughtful, and, at times, a very grave man; for he was not exempt from those ills that all flesh is heir to, and had his sorrows and his difficulties and moments of depression like the rest of us. At such times it was dangerous to thwart or disturb him, for he was a man of strong passions and indomitable determination; but, whoever felt the effects of his moods of perplexity or disappointment, his children never did.” Mrs. Ross Church must forgive it if this description reminds me more than a little of a certificate to character I once heard given to a British skipper, a mahogany-faced man of immense strength and violence, in the office of one of Her Majesty’s consuls, in a Mediterranean port. This gallant seaman had been summoned by one of his men for assault and battery. He confessed the beating, but denied that it had been so aggravated as the plaintiff alleged. Moreover he pleaded provocation, and called up his boatswain as a witness to character. The boatswain, an honest-looking rather chuckle-headed fellow, was obviously torn by conflicting desires. He did not wish to displease his captain, and yet he did not wish to tell lies which would go against his comrade. Nothing definite could be got out of him while in the presence of the parties. When asked in confidence (and in an outer office) what the truth of the matter was, he answered, “Why, you see, sir, it’s just this—the captain he’s a very good sort of man as long as he has everything his own way—but when he’s crossed he clears the place.”

It may be taken as proved, then, that Marryat had in abundance that kind of good nature which is displayed[138] when the owner is pleased and happy—of which this may at least be said, that it is vastly superior to no good nature at all. Moreover, we have to consider what things it was that made him displeased and unhappy. Mrs. Ross Church’s qualification to the character just quoted shows that he did not entirely hang his fiddle up when he came home. To his children “he was a most indulgent father and friend, caring little what escapades they indulged in so long as they were not afraid to tell the truth. ‘Tell truth and shame the devil’ was a quotation constantly on his lips; and he always upheld falsehood and cowardice as the two worst vices of mankind. He never permitted anything to be locked or hidden away from his children, who were allowed to indulge their appetites at their own discretion; nor were they ever banished from the apartments which he occupied. Even whilst he was writing, they would pass freely in and out of the room, putting any questions to him that occurred to them, and the worst rebuke they ever encountered was the short determined order, ‘Cease your prattle, child, and leave the room,’ an order that was immediately obeyed. For with all his indulgence of them, Captain Marryat took care to impress one fact upon his children—that his word was law.”

The children were aware that they were dealing with a parent not incapable of getting in a rage, and therefore stopped in time—which is one of the many advantages of not possessing a too equable temper. These collisions of theirs with the sovereign authority at Langham cannot, however, have been frequent, as this further quotation from Mrs. Ross Church will show: “The long-expected[139] governess [there were great negotiations over the engagement of this official], when eventually secured and transplanted to Langham, was not received by the children, who had been accustomed to have their own way in everything, with much enthusiasm; and their father was the friend to whom they invariably appealed for protection against her authority. Captain Marryat had rather an original plan with respect to punishment and reward. He kept a quantity of small articles for presents in his secretary, and at the termination of each week the children, and governess armed with a report of their general behaviour, were ushered with much solemnity into the library to render up an account. Those who had behaved well during the preceding seven days received a prize, because they had been so good; and those who had behaved ill also received one, in hopes that they would never be naughty again. The governess was also presented with a gift, that her criticism on the justice of the transaction might be disarmed. Thus all parties left the room perfectly satisfied; an end which, Captain Marryat used to observe, it required some diplomacy to attain. The governess was in the habit of restraining the children’s thoughtlessness by imposition of fines or lessons when they tore their clothes; but, as tearing their clothes was an event of daily occurrence, the punishment became rather heavy; and one of the younger ones, having made a large rent in a new frock, ran in dismay to her father in order to consult him how best to escape the impending doom. Captain Marryat, without any regard to the future of the garment in question, took hold of the rent and tore off the whole lower[140] part of the skirt. ‘Tell her I did it,’ he said in explanation as he walked away.” This story, which had previously made its appearance in an article in the Cornhill Magazine, is supported there by the general assertion that whenever any of the young Marryats required punishment they were doubly petted for the rest of the day. “It seemed as if no amount of indulgence was thought too much for compensation; like the jam to take the taste of the physic out o............