74 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



with the other articles a great quantity of impressions of different seals, for a great 

 many Boys are always asking nie to give them the seals of my letters (as I have the 

 most) for gum seals, which indeed are very pretty. 1 quite long to see my gallant desk 

 arrive. Edward Fisher is not come to school. Schonswar is very kind to me, and he 

 alwa}'s gives me wafers when I want them, but now in the Even" we are not allowed to 

 stir from our places, and in the morning ho is doing French. 

 So good bye, and believe me. 



Your affectionate Son, 



Francis Galton. 



The last letter undated is written two weeks before the Christmas 

 holidays, again to be spent a\\ay from home. Clearly Frank had 

 heard of the coming change to Leamington. " I wish very much 

 indeed" — he writes to his father — "just to go to Birmingham again 

 and to see the Larches and Dudson — and other parts of Birmingham 

 again." In the following year, when Frank came home for his holidays 

 in June, he left Boulogne for good. But besides the change of home to 

 Leamington, other marked changes occurred for the Galtons in 1832. 

 Towards the end of January Grandmother Darwin — Elizabeth Collier 

 — became ill and died on the fifth of February. She had always been a 

 marked feature of the Galton circle. The visits to Breadsall Priory 

 (see Plates XLIII and XLIV) were frequent^ and Grandmother 

 Darwin's visits to Birmingham were much appreciated ; thus her death 

 was a source of great sorrow to her grandchildren. She had had 12 

 children, 41 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren and at her death 

 60 descendants survived her. On the 10th of June of the same year 

 Grandfather Galton also died ; he was buried in the Quaker ground at 

 Bull Street. Thus the visits to Duddeston, made by the grandchildren 

 hitherto two or three times a week, came to an end, and the influential 

 Quaker element'' disappeared from their lives. With the death of his 

 fatlier Samuel, Tertius Galton — already a fairly wealthy man — became 

 more so, and the future independence of the members of his family 

 was assured. It was largely the wealth acquired by his grandfather 

 Samuel Galton the second, that freed Francis Galton from any necessity 



^ Francis with his father, mother and sisters had had a very happy visit there in 

 1827. One evening they got up a country dance, their grandmother Elizabeth Collier — 

 then in her 80th year — joined in and heartily enjoyed it. 



^ The influences were of an intellectual kind also. The drawing room and dining 

 room at Duddeston were large rooms, three sides of the latter and part of the former 

 were lined with books of history, botany, natural history, poetry, etc., and the grand- 

 children had the advantage of being allowed to borrow any book they liked. 



