I o Concerning Kingsleys in General i 



Barnack Rectory, in Northamptonshire ; and during 

 his boyhood, which was spent partly at Clovelly and 

 partly at Chelsea, he was surrounded by influences 

 which were singularly well fitted to develop the 

 temperament with which he was endowed. The 

 strong, manly character of his father, a parson who 

 won the hearts of the stalwart Devonshire fishermen, 

 because he feared no danger, and could manage a 

 boat, shoot a herring-net, and haul a seine as one of 

 themselves ; the deep, poetic feeling of his mother ; 

 the life of romantic, and often tragic, incidents which 

 they and their children led in the loveliest of all 

 English coast villages, has been charmingly de- 

 scribed by Mrs. Charles Kingsley in the Memoirs of 

 her husband ; and many of the scenes in Henry 

 Kingsley's Hillyers and the Burtons, are laid in 

 the Chelsea of sixty years ago. He has pictured in 

 delightful detail the quaint streets and byways, the 

 interior of the old church, with the stone effigies of 

 the Lawrences and the Dacres and the black marble 

 monument of Sir Thomas More ; and also — what was 

 then one of the most striking features of the district 

 — that vast gloomy mansion ^ whose floors ' had been 

 trodden often enough by the statesmen and dandies 

 of Queen Elizabeth's court, and most certainly by 

 the stately woman herself,' towering above the squalid 

 modern houses around it ' with its tall, overhanging, 

 high-pitched roof and great dormer window, — the 



1 This building, which had once been the palace of the Earls of 

 Essex, was demolished in 1S42. 



