X 



LOUIS COMPTON MI ALL, 1842—1921. 



Louis Compton Miall was born at Bradford in the year 1842, and was the 

 fifth living son of a Congregational Minister, the Eev. James Goodeve Miall. 

 His mother was Elizabeth Symonds Mackenzie. The teaching element was 

 strong on both sides of his family. The Mialls had been schoolmasters and 

 preachers for generations. One of them, Moses Miall, had published a book 

 of Practical Eemarks on Education. The Mackenzies were also much given 

 to schoolmastering, and had come strongly under the influence of the 

 Edgeworths, whose educational methods were firmly established in the 

 family tradition. Sir Morell Mackenzie and Edward Compton, the actor, 

 were first cousins of L. C. Miall on the Mackenzie side, and Edward Miall, 

 M.P. for Bradford and Editor of the ' Non-Conformist,' was his father's 

 half-brother. 



The Eev. J. G. Miall was a man of varied attainments, and had a distinct 

 gift for teaching. He bestowed much pains on the training of his children, 

 for he knew that they would have to fight their way in the world on their 

 •own resources. He was very particular to train them in self-reliance, to give 

 them studious tastes, and the power of expressing themselves well. He had 

 himself a beautiful speaking voice, which the children all inherited in 

 varying degree, and he taught them to make the best use of it. 



L. C. Miall owed much also to his mother. She, like her husband, had a 

 pleasant voice and manner and much charm of personality, and she had 

 a power of holding her children's love and admiration which far exceeded 

 his. She was, above all things, deeply religious, but had so courteous and 

 sunny a disposition that religion, even the terrible early- Victorian religion, 

 could not make her gloomy. 



Louis seems to have been an enterprising and high-spirited child, keen 

 about games and mischief, and inclined to wander away from home on 

 solitary expeditions. He was sent first to a little school near his home, and, 

 later, when he was 9 years old, to Siicoates School, near Wakefield, then, as 

 now, a boarding school for the sons of Non-Conformist Ministers. 



At the time that he left school, L. C. Miall's interests were all classical 

 and literary. He had learned little mathematics and no science, but had 

 shown himself good at essay writing, and had stored his mind with fine 

 passages from Shakespeare and the Latin poets. He said in after life that 

 he knew nothing of Natural History as a schoolboy, though he tried to make 

 friends with a half-witted boy who could show him, as if by magic, all sorts 

 •of strange nests and creatures in places where no one else would see 

 anything. But even in those days he must have been unusually observant, 

 for he tells in the " Natural History of Aquatic Insects " how he and his 

 companions watched the dragon-fly escape from its pupa-case, and how they 

 saw the larva, " with its dingy colours, its forbidding shape, and its predatory 

 habits . . . stretch out its great paw and secure an unsuspecting victim." 



