Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 9

time to look upon as models of style. This absence of interest in
literature was accompanied by that complete and absolute indifference
to the fine arts which was so common in the middle classes and the
country aristocracy of those days. I mention these deficiencies to
explain the extreme dulness of my poor father's existence during his
widowhood, a dulness that a lover of books must have a difficulty in
imagining. A man living alone with servants (for his son's childhood
was spent elsewhere), who took hardly any interest in a profession that
had become little more than nominal for him, who had not even the
stimulus of a desire to accumulate wealth (almost the only recognized
object in the place where he lived), a man who had no intellectual
pursuits whatever, and whose youth was too far behind him for any
joyous physical activity, was condemned to seek such amusements as
the customs of the place afforded, and these all led to drinking. He and
his friends drank when they were together to make society merrier, and
when they happened to be alone they drank to make solitude endurable.
Had they drunk light wines like French peasants, or beer like Germans,
they might have lasted longer, but their favorite drink was brandy in
hot strong grogs, accompanied by unlimited tobacco. They dined in the
middle of the day, and had the spirit decanters and the tobacco-box on
the table instead of dessert, frequently drinking through the whole
afternoon and a long evening 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