Autobiography | Page 8

construe them
sentence by sentence, but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when
asked: but the particular attention which he paid to elocution (in which his own
excellence was remarkable) made this reading aloud to him a most painful task. Of all
things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in
which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. He had thought much on the principles
of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflections of the voice,
or _modulation_, as writers on elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the one
side, and expression on the other), and had reduced it to rules, grounded on the logical
analysis of a sentence. These rules he strongly impressed upon me, and took me severely
to task for every violation of them: but I even then remarked (though I did not venture to
make the remark to him) that though he reproached me when I read a sentence ill, and
told me how I ought to have read it, he never by reading it himself, showed me how it
ought to be read. A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of instruction,
as it did through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the
intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete. It was at a much later
period of my youth, when practising elocution by myself, or with companions of my own
age, that I for the first time understood the object of his rules, and saw the psychological
grounds of them. At that time I and others followed out the subject into its ramifications,
and could have composed a very useful treatise, grounded on my father's principles. He
himself left those principles and rules unwritten. I regret that when my mind was full of
the subject, from systematic practice, I did not put them, and our improvements of them,
into a formal shape.
A book which contributed largely to my education, in the best sense of the term, was my
father's History of India. It was published in the beginning of 1818. During the year
previous, while it was passing through the press, I used to read the proof sheets to him; or
rather, I read the manuscript to him while he corrected the proofs. The number of new
ideas which I received from this remarkable book, and the impulse and stimulus as well
as guidance given to my thoughts by its criticism and disquisitions on society and
civilization in the Hindoo part, on institutions and the acts of governments in the English
part, made my early familiarity with it eminently useful to my subsequent progress. And
though I can perceive deficiencies in it now as compared with a perfect standard, I still
think it, if not the most, one of the most instructive histories ever written, and one of the
books from which most benefit may be derived by a mind in the course of making up its
opinions.
The Preface, among the most characteristic of my father's writings, as well as the richest
in materials of thought, gives a picture which may be entirely depended on, of the

sentiments and expectations with which he wrote the History. Saturated as the book is
with the opinions and modes of judgment of a democratic radicalism then regarded as
extreme; and treating with a severity, at that time most unusual, the English Constitution,
the English law, and all parties and classes who possessed any considerable influence in
the country; he may have expected reputation, but certainly not advancement in life, from
its publication; nor could he have supposed that it would raise up anything but enemies
for him in powerful quarters: least of all could he have expected favour from the East
India Company, to whose commercial privileges he was unqualifiedly hostile, and on the
acts of whose government he had made so many severe comments: though, in various
parts of his book, he bore a testimony in their favour, which he felt to be their just due,
namely, that no Government had on the whole given so much proof, to the extent of its
lights, of good intention towards its subjects; and that if the acts of any other Government
had the light of publicity as completely let in upon them, they would, in all probability,
still less bear scrutiny.
On learning, however, in the spring of 1819, about a year after the publication of the
History, that the East India Directors desired to strengthen the part of their home
establishment which was employed in carrying on the correspondence with India, my
father declared himself a candidate for that employment, and, to the credit