He was a hearty, genial man, of portly person, and fine, intelligent,
handsome face; active and energetic in his habits and movements, in
spite of a slight lameness, which I remember he accounted for to me in
the following manner. He was very intimate with Miss O'Neil before she
left the stage and became Lady Becher. While dancing with her in a
country-dance one evening at her house, she exclaimed, on hearing a
sudden sonorous twang, "Dear me! there is one of the chords of my harp
snapped." "Indeed it is not," replied Dr. Malkin; "it is my
tendo-Achillis which has snapped." And so it was; and from that time he
always remained lame.
Mrs. Malkin was a more uncommon person than her husband; the strength of
her character and sweetness of her disposition were alike admirable, and
the bright vivacity of her countenance and singular grace and dignity of
her person must be a pleasant memory in the minds of all who, like
myself, knew her while she was yet in the middle bloom of life.
Dr. and Mrs. Malkin's sons were my brother's school and college mates.
They were all men of ability, and good scholars, as became their
father's sons. Sir Benjamin, the eldest, achieved eminence as a lawyer,
and became an Indian judge; and the others would undoubtedly have risen
to distinction but for the early death that carried off Frederick and
Charles, and the hesitation of speech which closed almost all public
careers to their brother Arthur.
He was a prominent and able contributor to the "Library of Useful
Knowledge," and furnished a great part of the first of a whole
generation of delightful publications, Murray's "Hand-Book" for
Switzerland.
One of the earliest of Alpine explorers, Arthur Malkin mounted to those
icy battlements which have since been scaled by a whole army of
besiegers, and planted the banner of English courage and enterprise on
"peaks, passes, and glaciers" which, when he first climbed the shining
summits of the Alps, were all but _terra incognita_ to his countrymen.
There is nothing more familiar to the traveling and reading British
public nowadays than Alpine adventures and their records; but when my
friend first conquered the passes between Evolena and Zermatt (still one
of the least overrun mountain regions of Switzerland), their sublime
solitudes were awful with the mystery of unexplored loneliness. Now
professors climb up them, and artists slide down them, and they are
photographed with "members" straddling over their dire crevasses, or
cutting capers on their scornful summits, or turning somersaults down
their infinite precipices. The air of the high Alps was inhaled by few
Englishmen before Arthur Malkin; one can not help thinking that now,
even on the top of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, it must have lost some
of its freshness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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