16 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



hair, the strange costume, the familiar tall thin figure on 

 the box. The dress in which he would reappear was ever 

 a subject of speculation. Once he arrived in yellow-topped 

 boots and nankeen small-clothes ; another time in a cut- 

 away, snuff-coloured coat ; and once in leather breeches. 

 Expostulation on these occasions was thrown away ; his 

 unfailing resource under my grandmother's sarcasm was, 

 " Pooh ! the tailor told me it was proper for me to have ! " 

 His copious head of hair had grown pure silver before he 

 was fifty, and was extremely becoming. In spite of the 

 beautiful and venerable appearance with which nature had 

 supplied him, he nourished a guilty hankering after a 

 brown wig. My grandmother had long suspected the 

 existence of such a piece of goods, but he had never had 

 the temerity to produce it at home. At last, however, 

 when Philip was thirteen or fourteen years of age, the old 

 gentleman came home from his travels daringly adorned 

 with the lovely snuff-coloured peruke. My grandmother 

 was no palterer. Her first salute was to snatch it off his 

 head, and to whip it into the fire, where the possessor was 

 fain ruefully to watch it frizzle and consume. 



Mr. Thomas Gosse had collected a considerable mass 

 of miscellaneous literary information, and his son after- 

 wards often regretted that he so seldom felt drawn to 

 impart it to his children. The memory of his second son 

 would certainly have borne away the greater portion of 

 any instruction so given, and as a very extraordinary 

 instance of the child's retentive power, I may mention 

 the following fact : — My father happened once to relate to 

 me a conversation he had with his father about the year 

 1823 — that is to say, nearly half a century previously — in 

 the course of which Mr. Thomas Gosse had quoted a 

 stanza of a poem on the Norman Conquest, in which there 

 were many Saxonisms. This stanza my father had never 



