A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 139 



guardianship over me from these shadows of ancestors: 

 I owe to them that their descendant never 



" Frangenda miseram funestat imagine gentem." 



I sometimes think that they who possess ancestral 

 Knellers, Jansens, Zuccheros (not so much perhaps of 

 a Prelate, a Privy Seal, or High Admiral as of a 

 succession of obscure country gentility addicted 

 valiantly to serve their country at home and at the 

 wars), that such fortunates should be beyond the 

 danger of a wilful degeneracy. My blind silhouettes 

 have their power : what influence might there not be 

 in the eyes of a Van Dyck ? It was a saying of my 

 father's, which touches this use of descent on its other 

 side 



" The first Radical must have been a man whose 

 father was hanged." 



Some way from the silhouettes hangs a little pencil 

 sketch of a girl's head, a relic of the grand passion of 

 my early teens. It escaped the fire by some chance; 

 and after all these lustrums I am not sorry to have it 

 by me as a dry primrose may mark a page in one's 

 solid folios. Through the quaint horror of the 

 unequal eyes and laboured hair, I can see pretty 

 Barbara as she looked in the last summer of our 

 fellowship I recall even the mauve pinafore, the 



