before this, when I had been set to read as holiday tasks 

 works far beyond my years (such zsHamlet and Macaulay's 

 Essays on Hampden and Bunyan), my father read them 

 with me, and made them living and intelligible. (On 

 one of these occasions I won the prize for the holiday 

 task, and my Head Master remarked that I must have 

 used an unusually good edition of the book ; but I had 

 only a plain text and my father's comments as we read 

 it together.) At one time he had evidently enjoyed the 

 Classics, and to the end of his life would sometimes 

 bring in an apt quotation from Virgil or Horace. 



Apart from his work with Mr. Barnes, my father seems 

 to have lived the regular life of the son of a country- 

 house, enjoying all kinds of sport shooting most of 

 all and taking part in the social enjoyments of the 

 neighbourhood. He was a keen bee-keeper during some 

 of these years, getting much pleasure out of his observa- 

 tion of bees and their ways j and he was always fond of 

 gardening. In 1 849 he went to London to study Law, 

 intending to practise at the Bar. He read for two years 

 with Mr. J. G. Malcolm and Mr. (afterwards Mr. Justice) 

 Day; but the character of the work and the life in London 

 did not suit him, and in the summer of 1 8 5- 1 he gave it up, 

 though not before he had received a training in method 

 which stood him in good stead in later life. The next 

 two years (1851-3) seem to have been spent mainly in 

 Somerset, where he read with a tutor at Hatch Beauchamp. 

 His sketch-book of this period contains some exquisite 



