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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



would have taken. He would have said : " Let 

 each worshiper for himself lay down his own 

 minimum of belief; let each separate body of 

 worshipers lay down its minimum ; and then let 

 us come as near as we can to a common minimum 

 for certain occasions of common worship." 



To end these notices of a man who well de- 

 serves a better memorial (which, alas ! is but a 

 poor compliment), we may add a few more facts. 

 On his mother's side, Howard Hinton was of that 

 very energetic and every way remarkable strain 

 to which belonged the Taylors of Ougar, and he 

 exhibited most distinct traces of his ancestry. 

 His forehead was high, and somewhat retreating. 

 His eyes were deep set, and, when we first saw 

 them, reminded us of "the pale-eyed priests." 

 His nose was strong and semi-aquiline. His ut- 

 terance was singularly firm and clear — the aspi- 

 rates powerfully given, and the syllabification 

 marked. Every reader of these lines who knew 

 him will call to mind his peculiar way of saying 

 " the Lord," pronouncing the word somewhat as 

 if it were written " Lo-ard." His "address" 

 could hardly be called engaging ; but it had the 

 charm — a very real one — of a noble truthfulness. 

 His son James, the doctor, to whom we are now 

 coming, once " cured " a patient (indeed, he did 

 the like more than once) by sham physic. His 

 father dissuaded him from telling the cured man 

 of this device lest it should hurt his moral sense. 

 One personal peculiarity we will mention because 

 it is very characteristic, though our mentioning 

 it may be called by high-polite people bad taste. 

 He was a long way from bow-legged, but his legs 

 were of the sturdy sort, and the curve was out- 

 ward rather than inward. This gave a very de- 

 cided peculiarity to his walk — a peculiarity which 

 descended to his son James. 



Prefixed to the " Life and Letters of James 

 Hinton," for which Miss Elliee Hopkins has just 

 made us her debtor, is a beautiful portrait of him, 

 engraved on steel by Mr. Jeens, from a photo- 

 graph. It exhibits a very strong resemblance to 

 his father's face, though it contains much more 

 tenderness and poetry, too — both of them inheri- 

 tances from the mother, to whom James dedi- 

 cated his " Mystery of Pain." In the heads of 

 both father and son the " metaphysical horseshoe " 

 was strongly marked ; and in both the forehead 

 was of the mould which indicates that the move- 

 ment of the mind is rather upon lines of Analogy 

 or Congruity than upon lines of Causation or 

 Necessary Sequence. Of course, both these ele- 

 ments of the reasoning faculty were strong in 

 each — we merely notice that the tendency to ar- 



gue by analogy was the stronger of the two. In 

 James, the external signs of the poetic tendency 

 are strongly marked. They were wanting in the 

 father, and the tendency to sacrifice to the Graces 

 was never said to be too strong in the Hintons. 

 That (in Swedenborgian phrase) " the Lord's 

 kingdom is a kingdom of uses," was with them a 

 matter of unceasing " testimony " and practice. 

 If any member of the household was so ill as to 

 make it a comfort, Hinton pere would have a bed 

 down into the sitting-room ; and visitors might 

 think what they pleased. One thing they could 

 not fail to think — that they had come to see 

 wholly good, truthful, and delightful people — full 

 of simple, unpurposed kindness, and unfashion- 

 ably but beautifully indifferent to vulgar, poverty- 

 struck " proprieties." In some respects, there- 

 fore, the early training of James Hinton was as 

 felicitous as it possibly could be. We could well 

 have forgiven the biographer a few more details 

 of the home at Reading (where Howard Hinton 

 was preaching until about 1840), and even of the 

 London home ; though of course it would have 

 been a delicate matter to venture so far. One 

 very home-like glimpse we do get ; but it is not 

 till James is a young man. After being abroad, 

 he comes home at about five o'clock one morn- 

 ing. It is one of two sisters who writes thus to 

 another sister : 



" Only think, dearest, that when your letter 

 arrived, our precious wanderer was sleeping at 

 home. He came at half-past five this morning, 

 and knocked papa up, and, after speaking to mam- 

 ma, went to bed, where he is still. The little 

 boys amused us at breakfast with their account of 

 the intruder's manoeuvres. John was startled into 

 consciousness by the sudden elevation of the pil- 

 low with his head upon it, in James's endeavor to 

 put his watch under it ; and Josiah said, with 

 something between a smile and a pout, ' lie 

 turned me out of my warm place to get in him- 

 self.' " 



James Hinton was the second son of his 

 parents, and was born at Reading in the year 

 1822. His life there was a very pleasant one. 

 By the death of the first-born he became the 

 eldest son of the family ; and, naturally, this cir- 

 cumstance drew him and his mother closer to- 

 gether. His education was, according to the 

 latest standards of " culture," not high ; but the 

 world has moved fast, and in some things fantas- 

 tically, since those days ; and Howard Hinton 

 was not a man to let his children go to any 

 school where they would run plain risk of being 

 inoculated with certain opinions or tastes abhor- 



