I.] PARENTAGE AND BOYHOOD. 13 



energetic nature, it was no doubt intensified by the pecu- 

 liar surroundings of his childhood and youth. Seldom 

 is a boy of his birth brought up in more complete 

 domestic seclusion. The widowed and heart-broken 

 father, after his wife's early death, withdrew to almost 

 absolute retirement, which, while it was congenial to 

 his own feelings, enabled him to devote himself more 

 entirely to the rearing of his children. This devotion 

 especially concentrated on the youngest, who be- 

 came his father's idol as the last legacy bequeathed to 

 him by her whom he had lost. His home at Colinton 

 House enabled him to seclude himself more completely 

 than most places so near a great capital. Lying not far 

 from the base of the Pentlands, approached by tree- 

 shaded lanes and by-roads, itself shut within its own 

 park by old trees, with a garden screened by still older 

 holly hedges wonderful for their size, with an ivy-mantled 

 ruin in the grounds said to have been rent in pieces 

 by Cromwell's cannon, and with a retired background 

 which sloped to the water of Leith, as yet undisturbed 

 by the railway whistle, it would be hard to find in so 

 peopled a neighbourhood so solitary a retirement. The 

 boy's not too strong health and the father's anxious 

 watchfulness secluded him still farther, and made school 

 a thing not to be thought of. The family at Colinton 

 were their own society, the visits even of relations were 

 rare, and there was little or no contact with the world 

 beyond. Such a mode of life, acting on a nature 

 itself strong and intense, could not but increase and 

 concentrate still more that intensity which was ever 

 afterwards its most marked characteristic. The stream, 

 confined from the very first within high and strong 

 :its, channelled still deeper the groove in 

 which it naturally ran. 



James Forbes never went to any school, but was 



roly a home-trained boy. Up to the time he cnt<T< ,1 



College at the age of 16, his only teachers had been 



sisters' governess and the village schoolmaster, 



Hunter, of Colinton Parish School. Fear for his 



