CHILDHOOD. 15 



and squandered his halfpence on their ill-desert. Once, 

 when the family was at dinner, a beggar strolled to the 

 door ; the maid came in and told the tale. My grand- 

 mother refused — " Nothing for him ! " But grandfather's 

 soft compassionate heart stayed the denial. " Oh yes ! 

 here's a halfpenny for the poor man." The beggar who, 

 through the open parlour-door, had heard all, shouted in, 

 as he took the copper, " God bless the man, — but not the 

 woman ! " 



Thomas Gosse was a great reader, especially of poetry, 

 but his wife had no approval for this exercise either. In 

 later years the children often recalled how he would, while 

 engaged in finishing a miniature in the back parlour, lay 

 down his brush and take up a volume of verse, till, on 

 hearing Mrs. Gosse's footstep in the passage, he would 

 hastily whip it under his little green-baize desk and set to 

 work on the ivory. My father well remembered the bor- 

 rowing of Scott's Lady of the Lake and the Lord of the 

 Isles in their original quartos, and especially, about 18 16, 

 the arrival of a batch of Byron's Tales, then quite new, and 

 in particular The Siege of Corinth. These my grandfather 

 read and re-read with an evident delight, to the great 

 curiosity of his little second son, in whom the literary 

 instinct was already faintly awakened ; but the pleasure 

 was confined to himself as a matter of course, since Mrs. 

 Gosse, from her absolute ignorance of books, could not 

 have appreciated or even comprehended it. 



When the miniature-painter was expected home from 

 one of his journeys, his little sons, evening after evening in 

 summer-time, would go up to the Angel Inn in the Market 

 Place, and wait on the pavement till the Salisbury coach 

 came rumbling in. The particular day of his coming was 

 never announced, and the children would be often disap- 

 pointed, till at length one evening they would see the white 



