Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography | Page 5

dissipation, I won some shillings
at "The Race-Game," they were impounded for the service of the
C.M.S., and an aunt of mine, making her sole excursion into melody,
wrote for the benefit of her young friends:
"Would you like to be told the best use for a penny? I can tell you a use
which is better than any-- Not on toys or on fruit or on sweetmeats to
spend it, But over the seas to the heathen to send it."
I learned my religion from my mother, the sweetest, brightest, and most
persuasive of teachers, and what she taught I received as gospel.

"Oh that those lips had language! Life has past With me but roughly
since I heard thee last."
Sit anima mea cum Sanctis. May my lot be with those Evangelical
saints from whom I first learned that, in the supreme work of salvation,
no human being and no created thing can interpose between the soul
and the Creator. Happy is the man whose religious life has been built
on the impregnable rock of that belief.
So much for the foundation. The superstructure was rather accidental
than designed.
From my very earliest days I had a natural love of pomp and pageantry;
and, though I never saw them, I used to read of them with delight in
books of continental travel, and try to depict them in my sketch-books,
and even enact them with my toys. Then came Sir Walter Scott, who
inspired me, as he inspired so many greater men, with the love of
ecclesiastical splendour, and so turned my vague love of ceremony into
a definite channel. Another contribution to the same end was made, all
unwittingly, by my dear and deeply Protestant father. He was an
enthusiast for Gothic architecture, and it was natural to enquire the uses
of such things as piscinas and sedilia in fabrics which he taught me to
admire. And then came the opportune discovery (in an idle moment
under a dull sermon) of the Occasional Offices of the Prayer Book. If
language meant anything, those Offices meant the sacramental system
of the Catholic Church; and the impression derived from the Prayer
Book was confirmed by Jeremy Taylor and The Christian Year. I was
always impatient of the attempt, even when made by the most
respectable people, to pervert plain English, and I felt perfect
confidence in building the Catholic superstructure on my Evangelical
foundation.
As soon as I had turned fourteen, I was confirmed by the Bishop of Ely
(Harold Browne), and made my first Communion in Woburn Church
on Easter Day, April 21, 1867.
After the Easter Recess, I went with my parents to London, then
seething with excitement over the Tory Reform Bill, which created

Household Suffrage in towns. My father, being Sergeant-at-Arms,
could give me a seat under the Gallery whenever he chose, and I heard
some of the most memorable debates in that great controversy. In the
previous year my uncle, Lord Russell, with Mr. Gladstone as Leader of
the House of Commons, had been beaten in an attempt to lower the
franchise; but the contest had left me cold. The debates of 1867 awoke
quite a fresh interest in me. I began to understand the Democratic, as
against the Whig, ideal; and I was tremendously impressed by Disraeli,
who seemed to tower by a head and shoulders above everyone in the
House. Gladstone played a secondary and ambiguous part; and, if I
heard him speak, which I doubt, the speech left no dint in my memory.
At this point of the narrative it is necessary to make a passing allusion
to Doctors, who, far more than Premiers or Priests or any other class of
men, have determined the course and condition of my life. I believe
that I know, by personal experience, more about Doctors and Doctoring
than any other man of my age in England. I am, in my own person, a
monument of medical practice, and have not only seen, but felt, the rise
and fall of several systems of physic and surgery. To have experienced
the art is also to have known the artist; and the portraits of all the
practitioners with whom at one time or another I have been brought
into intimate relations would fill the largest album, and go some way
towards furnishing a modest Picture-Gallery. Broadly speaking, the
Doctors of the 'fifties and 'sixties were as Dickens drew them. The
famous consultant, Dr. Parker Peps; the fashionable physician, Sir
Tumley Snuffim; the General Practitioner, Mr. Pilkins; and the Medical
Officer of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance
Company, Dr. Jobling; are in the highest degree representative and
typical; but perhaps the Doctor--his name, unfortunately, has
perished--who was called to the bedside of little Nell, and came with "a