xii BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR 



quiet, uneventful, but very full of suffering. The plan which 

 I shall adopt in the following memoir will be this: I shall 

 first give the story of the life in as compact a form as may be 

 possible, and then endeavour to lay before the reader some 

 estimate of the mind and character. 



EGBERT LESLIE ELLIS was born at Bath, August 25, 1817, 

 being the youngest of a family consisting of three sons and three 

 daughters. His mother's health was not good, and from her 

 he appears to have inherited that highly nervous constitution, 

 which became, during a considerable portion of his life, as we 

 shall see hereafter, the medium of great suffering. His father 

 was a man of cheerful disposition, of active and well cultivated 

 intellect, fond of speculative inquiry, and in worldly circum- 

 stances independent. His character and his mode of dealing 

 with Robert, as a child, had a great influence upon him through- 

 out his life : he became his father's companion from a very 

 early age, and the affection with which he referred in later 

 life to his father's care and to the happy days of his boyhood, 

 could not fail to strike those who had the pleasure of know- 

 ing him intimately, 



I do not find that as a child he exhibited any extraordinary 

 symptoms of precocity 1 , though it is manifest, from records of 

 his boyish doings made by himself, that he was very forward 

 in his studies, and that he took an interest in his work, and 



1 With reference to what is said in the text, and possibly the reader may 

 think in contradiction to it, I insert here a memorandum, which I find, amongst 

 the papers intrusted to me, and which appears to be in his father's hand. 



"The following numerical theorem, if not curious in itself, may perhaps be 

 esteemed so, as coming from a boy of eight years old, who was not far advanced 

 in the ordinary rales of arithmetic. 



" If any number be added to its equal, subtracted from its equal, multiplied by 

 its equal, and divided by its equal, then the sum, the difference, the product, and 

 the quotient of these equal numbers, added together, will equal the square of the 

 next higher number." 



That is to say, if n be the number, 



