My Life as an Author | Page 5

duels, were my nursery ramblings in search of
cowslips and new milk. Also, that once at least in those infantile days,
my father took me to see Winsor's Patent Gaslights at Carlton House,
and how he prognosticated the domestic failure of so perilous an

explosive, more than one blowing-up having carelessly occurred.
* * * * *
Another infantile recollection is memorable, as thus. My father's annual
holiday happened one year to be at Bognor, where a patron patient of
his, Lord Arran, rented a pleasant villa, and he had for a visitor at the
time no less a personage than George the Third: it must have been
during some lucid interval, perhaps after the Great Thanksgiving at St.
Paul's. My father took his little boy with him to call upon the Earl, not
thinking to see the King; but when we came in there was his
kind-hearted Majesty, who patted my curls and gave me his blessing!
How far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected my after
career believers in the divine rights and spiritual powers of a king may
speculate as they please. At all events I got a good man's blessing.
I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of
a dream. My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy's Hospital,
from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the
wounded after the battle of Copenhagen. He was on one occasion
leaving Guernsey for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of
those days, when, on the night before embarking, he dreamt that on his
way to the harbour he crossed the churchyard and fell into an open
grave. Telling this to his parents at "The Pollet," they would not let him
go, with a sort of superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the
smack was seized on its voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and
passengers were consigned--for twelve years--to a French prison! I
have heard my father tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr.
Watts' awkward line, "On little things what great depend." I might say
more about warnings in dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all
have experiences. For instance, my "Dream of Ambition" in Proverbial
Philosophy was a real one. And this reminds me now of another like
sort of spiritual monition alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth
in Things False," which has several times occurred to myself, as this,
for example: Years ago, in Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the
top of a coach passing through a town--I think it was Crediton--and I
had the strange feeling that I had seen all this before: now, we changed

horses just on this side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to
test the truth of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what
I should see right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all
as I had foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents. Now, if
reasonably asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the
like), I reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the
soul may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real
and ideal. But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a
judgment upon the famous Horatian philosophy of "more things in
heaven and earth," &c.
* * * * *
On Mr. Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to
myself. Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse
or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape
painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on
stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family. As to
my father's surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain,
wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs,
labelled by my father "in my late dear father's handwriting," but
whether or not original, I cannot tell. As a Guernseyman, he might well
be as much French as English. They seem to me clever and worthy of
Beranger, though long before him: possibly they are my grandsire's. A
very fair judge of French poetry, and himself a good Norman poet, Mr.
John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells me that the songs are excellent,
and that he remembers them to have been popularly sung when he was
a boy.
About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals
so with men, "fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;" this so far as bodies
are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable
instances prove, where children do not take after