Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography | Page 4

London for the
Session of Parliament, I attended a Day School, kept by two sisters of
John Leech, in a curious little cottage, since destroyed, at the bottom of
Lower Belgrave Street. Just at the age when, in the ordinary course, I
should have gone to a boarding-school, it was discovered that I was
physically unfit for the experiment; and then I had a series of tutors at
home. To one of these tutors my father wrote--"I must warn you of
your pupil's powers of conversation, and tact in leading his teachers
into it."

But I was to a great extent self-taught. We had an excellent, though
old-fashioned, library, and I spent a great deal of my time in
miscellaneous reading. The Waverley Novels gave me my first taste of
literary enjoyment, and Pickwick (in the original green covers) came
soon after. Shakespeare and Don Quixote were imposed by paternal
authority. Jeremy Taylor, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Dryden, Pope,
Byron, Moore, Macaulay, Miss Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, were
among my earliest friends, and I had an insatiable thirst for dictionaries
and encyclopædias. Tennyson was the first poet whom I really loved,
but I also was fond of Scott's poetry, the Lays of Ancient Rome, the
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, and The Golden Treasury. Milton,
Shelley, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold came later, but while I was
still a boy. George Eliot, Thackeray, Ruskin, and Trollope came when I
was at Oxford; and I am not sure that Browning ever came. On the
whole, I owe my chief enjoyment to Scott, Dickens, Wordsworth, and
Tennyson, and to Pickwick more than to any single book. But I think
the keenest thrill of intellectual pleasure which I ever felt passed
through me when, as a boy at Harrow, I first read Wordsworth's
"Daffodils."
Our home, in its outward aspects, was extremely bright and cheerful.
We had, as a family, a keen sense of fun, much contempt for
convention, and great fluency of speech; and our material surroundings
were such as to make life enjoyable. Even as a child, I used to say to
myself, when cantering among Scotch firs and rhododendrons, "The
lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places." A graver element was
supplied by a good deal of ill-health, by bereavements, and, in some
sense, by our way of religion. My home was intensely Evangelical, and
I lived from my earliest days in an atmosphere where the salvation of
the individual soul was the supreme and constant concern of life. No
form of worldliness entered into it, but it was full of good works, of
social service, and of practical labour for the poor. All life was lived,
down to its minutest detail, "as ever in the great task-Master's eye."
From our very earliest years we were taught the Bible, at first orally;
and later on were encouraged to read it, by gifts of handsomely bound
copies. I remember that our aids to study were Adam Clarke's
Commentary, Nicholl's Help to Reading the Bible, and a book called

Light in the Dwelling. Hymns played a great part in our training. As
soon as we could speak, we learned "When rising from the bed of
death," and "Beautiful Zion, built above." "Rock of Ages" and "Jesu,
Lover of my soul" were soon added. The Church Catechism we were
never taught. I was confirmed without learning it. It was said to be too
difficult; it really was too sacramental. By way of an easier exercise, I
was constrained to learn "The Shorter Catechism of the General
Assembly of Divines at Westminster." We had Family Prayers twice
every day. My father read a chapter, very much as the fancy took him,
or where the Bible opened of itself; and he read without note or
comment. I recall a very distinct impression on my infant mind that the
passages of the Old Testament which were read at prayers had no
meaning, and that the public reading of the words, without reference to
sense, was an act of piety. After the chapter, my father read one of
Henry Thornton's Family Prayers, replaced in later years by those of
Ashton Oxenden.
While we were still very young children, we were carefully incited to
acts of practical charity. We began by carrying dinners to the sick and
aged poor; then we went on to reading hymns and bits of Bible to the
blind and unlettered. As soon as we were old enough, we became
teachers in Sunday schools, and conducted classes and
cottage-meetings. From the very beginning we were taught to save up
our money for good causes. Each of us had a "missionary box," and I
remember another box, in the counterfeit presentment of a Gothic
church, which received contributions for the Church Pastoral Aid
Society. When, on an occasion of rare