and made no secret about his being a gourmet. 'When we are young,' he used to say, 'we care only for good society or good sport; when we arrive at middle age, we begin to yearn after a good heart and real solid worth; and when we have reached maturity, and find that fashion is only vexation of spirit, and friendship but a social expression, we fully appreciate what an excellent thing, what a pearl beyond price, is-not a wife, but a good cook. The pleasures of the table never fail to console us in our sorrows or anxieties. Henry I., they say, never smiled after the death of his son -well, he died from over-eating lampreys !'

Another odd thing my poor father did, was (when his house was free from visitors) to put all the clocks three hours forwards, and make his household regulate their habits accordingly. At times he had fits of the blackest depression, which caused

him to shut himself up in his room, see no one, and imagine that every one was plotting some conspiracy against his life or some of his worldly interests.

He was bitterly sarcastic, and, like most men of that disposition, very fickle. He would take a strong fancy to a man one day, and dislike him the next. As a rule, he disliked people far more than he liked them. With the members of his family he had quarrelled over and over again, till at last all intercourse was broken off between them and him, and I was forbidden to see or visit any of them. Our family had from time immemorial been noted for its intestine hates. Fathers had hated their sons, brothers their brothers, so frequently among us, that we were called the 'happy family;" and to hate like a Disney passed into a local proverb. I soon learnt the cause of this unhappy family failing.

I was my father's only son, and on me he lavished every kindness that parental affection could prompt. I was educated at home by one of his curates, who was a most able scholar; for my father entertained the strongest objections to English public schools, regarding them as hot-beds of vice, which not unfrequently lead to the ruin of the purity of youth. He was an old Etonian, and drew his conclusions, I suppose, from experience. As a boy I was extremely fond of reading, and made such progress in my studies, that my tutor prophesied great things of me when I should go up to Oxford. But my chief pleasure was in sketching and painting, for which I early showed a great aptitude. I would spend all my leisure in drawing heads and figures, and then colouring them.

My father, seeing that I possessed a precocious amount of artistic talent, thought it

a desirable thing for me to cultivate it; and accordingly three times a week I took lessons from an artist who came over from Exeter to teach me. How I longed for those days when, instead of Latin and Greek, and logic and mathematics, I sat copying Roman heads and Neapolitan peasants under my master's eye! By the time I was nineteen I had made such progress in art, and evinced such a deep love for it, that, had it not been for my father's countrygentleman's idea, that to be an artist was not a gentleman-like profession, I should have asked to go to Rome instead of to Oxford. But my father intended me for the Church, and I knew would never sanction such a request. Art, in his eyes, was all very well as a délassement, but as a profession it was, both socially and pecuniarily, a poor thing.

In looking back on my past life, I can

see how in me the child was father of the man. As a boy, my great fault was a weakness of character and irresolution that made me unable to resist anything which strongly tempted me. My tutor used to put me on my guard against this natural failing, and tell me that, unless I tried to get the better of it, I should always be a vacillating character, and dependent on the will of others. And yet, in spite of this vacillation, when my mind was once made up about a thing, I was as obstinate and as difficult to turn from my purpose as a Scotchman. There was something of my father's disposition in me too as a youth, which contact with the world in after life happily tended to dispel. I cared very little for society; and instead of dancing at the different Devonshire archery meetings, or accompanying my father in his frequent visits to the different country houses around