in the Dwelling. Hymns played a great part in our training. As soon as we could speak, we learned "When rising from the bed of death," and "Beautiful Zion, built above." "Rock of Ages" and "Jesu, Lover of my soul" were soon added. The Church Catechism we were never taught. I was confirmed without learning it. It was said to be too difficult; it really was too sacramental. By way of an easier exercise, I was constrained to learn "The Shorter Catechism of the General Assembly of Divines at Westminster." We had Family Prayers twice every day. My father read a chapter, very much as the fancy took him, or where the Bible opened of itself; and he read without note or comment. I recall a very distinct impression on my infant mind that the passages of the Old Testament which were read at prayers had no meaning, and that the public reading of the words, without reference to sense, was an act of piety. After the chapter, my father read one of Henry Thornton's Family Prayers, replaced in later years by those of Ashton Oxenden.

While we were still very young children, we were carefully incited to acts of practical charity. We began by carrying dinners to the sick and aged poor; then we went on to reading hymns and bits of Bible to the blind and unlettered. As soon as we were old enough, we became teachers in Sunday schools, and conducted classes and cottage-meetings. From the very beginning we were taught to save up our money for good causes. Each of us had a "missionary box," and I remember another box, in the counterfeit presentment of a Gothic church, which received contributions for the Church Pastoral Aid Society. When, on an occasion of rare dissipation, I won some shillings at "The Race-Game," they were impounded for the service of the C.M.S., and an aunt of mine, making her sole excursion into melody, wrote for the benefit of her young friends:

I learned my religion from my mother, the sweetest, brightest, and most persuasive of teachers, and what she taught I received as gospel.

Sit anima mea cum Sanctis. May my lot be with those Evangelical saints from whom I first learned that, in the supreme work of salvation, no human being and no created thing can interpose between the soul and the Creator. Happy is the man whose religious life has been built on the impregnable rock of that belief.

So much for the foundation. The superstructure was rather accidental than designed.

From my very earliest days I had a natural love of pomp and pageantry; and, though I never saw them, I used to read of them with delight in books of continental travel, and try to depict them in my sketch-books, and even enact them with my toys. Then came Sir Walter Scott, who inspired me, as he inspired so many greater men, with the love of ecclesiastical splendour, and so turned my vague love of ceremony into a definite channel. Another contribution to the same end was made, all unwittingly, by my dear and deeply Protestant father. He was an enthusiast for Gothic architecture, and it was natural to enquire the uses of such things as piscinas and sedilia in fabrics which he taught me to admire. And then came the opportune discovery (in an idle moment under a dull sermon) of the Occasional Offices of the Prayer Book. If language meant anything, those Offices meant the sacramental system of the Catholic Church; and the impression derived from the Prayer Book was confirmed by Jeremy Taylor and The Christian Year. I was always impatient of the attempt, even when made by the most respectable people, to pervert plain English, and I felt perfect confidence in building the Catholic superstructure on my Evangelical foundation.

As soon as I had turned fourteen, I was confirmed by the Bishop of Ely (Harold Browne), and made my first Communion in Woburn Church on Easter Day, April 21, 1867.

After the Easter Recess, I went with my parents to London, then seething with excitement over the Tory Reform Bill, which created Household Suffrage in towns. My father, being Sergeant-at-Arms, could give me a seat under the Gallery whenever he chose, and I heard some of the most memorable debates in that great controversy. In the previous year my uncle, Lord Russell, with Mr. Gladstone as Leader of the House of Commons, had been beaten in an attempt to lower the franchise; but the contest had left me cold. The debates of 1867 awoke quite a fresh interest in me. I began to understand the Democratic, as against the Whig, ideal; and I was tremendously impressed by Disraeli, who seemed to tower by a head and shoulders above everyone in the House. Gladstone played a secondary and ambiguous part; and, if I heard him speak, which I doubt, the speech left no dint in my memory.

At this point of the narrative it is necessary to make a passing allusion to Doctors, who, far more than Premiers or Priests or any other class of men, have determined the course and condition of my life. I believe that I know, by personal experience, more about Doctors and Doctoring than any other man of my age in England. I am, in my own person, a monument of medical practice, and have not only seen, but felt, the rise and fall of several systems of physic and surgery. To have experienced the art is also to have known the artist; and the portraits of all the practitioners with whom at one time or another I have been brought into intimate relations would fill the largest album, and go some way towards furnishing a modest Picture-Gallery. Broadly speaking, the Doctors of the 'fifties and 'sixties were as Dickens drew them. The famous consultant, Dr. Parker Peps; the fashionable physician, Sir Tumley Snuffim; the General Practitioner, Mr. Pilkins; and the Medical Officer of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company, Dr. Jobling; are in the highest degree representative and typical; but perhaps the Doctor—his name, unfortunately, has perished—who was called to the bedside of little Nell, and came with "a great bunch of seals dangling below a waistcoat of ribbed black satin," is the most carefully finished portrait. Such, exactly, were the Family Physicians of my youth. They always dressed in shiny black,—trousers, neckcloth, and all; they were invariably bald, and had shaved upper lips and chins, and carefully-trimmed whiskers. They said "Hah!" and "Hum!" in tones of omniscience which would have converted a Christian Scientist; and, when feeling one's pulse, they produced the largest and most audibly-ticking gold watches producible by the horologist's art. They had what were called "the courtly manners of the old school"; were diffuse in style, and abounded in periphrasis. Thus they spoke of "the gastric organ" where their successors talk of the stomach, and referred to brandy as "the domestic stimulant." When attending families where religion was held in honour, they were apt to say to the lady of the house, "We are fearfully and wonderfully made"; and, where classical culture prevailed, they not infrequently remarked—

By the way, my reference to "the domestic stimulant" reminds me that on stimulants, domestic and other, this school of Physicians relied with an unalterable confidence. For a delicate