Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 9

afterwards. In the morning they slaked alcoholic thirst with copious draughts of ale. My father went on steadily with this kind of existence without anything whatever to rescue him from its gradual and fatal degradation. He separated himself entirely from the class he belonged to by birth, lived with men of little culture, though they may have had natural wit, and sacrificed his whole future to mere village conviviality. Thousands of others have followed the same road, but few have sacrificed so much. My father had a constitution such as is not given to one man in ten thousand, and his mind was strong and clear, though he had not literary tastes. He was completely independent, free to travel or to make a fortune in his profession if he preferred a sedentary existence, but the binding force of habit overcame his weakened will, and he fell into a kind of life that placed intellectual and moral recovery alike beyond his reach.

CHAPTER III.
1835-1841.
My childhood is passed at Burnley with my aunts.--My grandfather and grandmother.--Estrangement between Gilbert Hamerton and his brother of Hellifield Peel.--Death of Gilbert Hamerton.--His taste for the French language.--His travels in Portugal, and the conduct of a steward during his absence.--His three sons.--Aristocratic tendencies of his daughters.--Beginning of my education.--Visits to my father.
I was not brought up during childhood under my father's roof, but was sent to live with his two unmarried sisters. These ladies were then living in Burnley with their mother.
Burnley is now a large manufacturing town of seventy thousand inhabitants, but in those days it was just rising in importance, and a few years earlier it had been a small country town in an uncommonly aristocratic neighborhood. The gate of Towneley Park opens now almost upon the town itself, and in former times there were many other seats of the greater or lesser squires within a radius of a very few miles. It is a common mistake in the south of England to suppose that Lancashire is a purely commercial county. There are, or were in my youth, some very aristocratic neighborhoods in Lancashire, and that immediately about Burnley was one of them. The creation of new wealth, and the extinction or departure of a few families, may have altered its character since then, but in the days of my grandfather nobody thought of disputing the supremacy of the old houses. There was something almost sublime in the misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the history of Lancashire.
My grandfather, Gilbert Hamerton, possessed an old gabled mansion with a small but picturesque estate, divided from Towneley Park by a public road, and he had other property in the town and elsewhere enough to make him independent, but not enough to make him one of the great squires. However, as he was the second son of an ancient Yorkshire family, and as pedigrees and quarterings counted for something in those comparatively romantic times, the somewhat exclusive aristocracy about Burnley had received him with much cordiality from the first, and he continued all his life to belong to it. His comparative poverty was excused by a well-known history of confiscation in his family, and perhaps made him rather more interesting, especially as it did not go far enough to become--what poverty becomes so easily--ridiculous. He lived in a large old house, and plentifully enough, but without state and style. His marriage had been extremely imprudent from the worldly point of view. An aunt of my grandfather's, on his mother's side, had invited him to stay with her, and had not foreseen the attractions of a farmer's daughter who was living in the house as a companion. My good, unworldly grandfather fell in love with this girl, and married her. He never had any serious reason to regret this very imprudent step, for Jane Smith became an excellent wife and mother, and she did not even injure his position in society, where she knew how to make herself respected, and was much beloved by her most intimate friends. I remember her, though I never knew my grandfather. My recollection of her is a sort of picture of an old lady always dressed in black, and seated near a window, or walking slowly with a stick. The dawn of reason and feeling is associated in my memory with an intense affection for this old lady and with the kind things she said to me, not yet forgotten. I remember, too, the awful stillness of her dead body (hers was the first dead human body I looked upon), and the strange emptiness