1825 EARLY LIFE , 



1825, " about eight o'clock in the morning." * " I am not 

 aware," he tells us playfully in his Autobiography, " that 

 any portents preceded my arrival in this world, but, in my 

 childhood, I remember hearing a traditional account of the 

 manner in which I lost the chance of an endowment of 

 great practical value. The windows of my mother's room 

 were open, in consequence of the unusual warmth of the 

 weather. For the same reason, probably, a neighbouring 

 beehive had swarmed, and the new colony, pitching on the 

 window-sill, was making its way into the room when the 

 horrified nurse shut down the sash. If that well-meaning 

 woman had only abstained from her ill-timed interference, 

 the swarm might have settled on my lips, and I should have 

 been endowed with that mellifluous eloquence which, in this 

 country, leads far more surely than worth, capacity, or 

 honest work, to the highest places in Church and State. 

 But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to 

 content myself through life with saying what I mean in the 

 plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no 

 habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement." 

 As to his debt, physical and mental, to either parent, he 

 writes as follows : — 



" Physically I am the son of my mother so completely — even 

 down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their 

 appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed 

 them — that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, 

 except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately, in 

 my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that 

 amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers some- 

 times call obstinacy. 



My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and ener- 

 getic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black 

 eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more education 

 than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an 

 excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing character- 

 istic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to sug- 

 gest that she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclu- 

 sion, she would say, " I cannot help it; things flash across me." 



* So in the Autobiography, but g.30 according to the Family Bible. 



