d down on them between
us and the town. To return to Mr. Rawson. Everything was
unobjectionable. I suppose I learnt something there. But I have no
recollection of being under any moral or personal influence
whatever, and I doubt whether the preaching had any adaptation
whatever to children. As to intellectual training, I believe that,
like the other boys, I shirked my work as much as I could. I went
to Eton in 1821 after a pretty long spell, in a very middling state
of preparation, and wholly without any knowledge or other
enthusiasm, unless it were a priggish love of argument which I had
begun to develop. I had lived upon a rabbit warren: and what a
rabbit warren of a life it is that I have been surveying.

My brother John, three years older than myself, and of a moral
character more manly and on a higher level, had chosen the navy,
and went off to the preparatory college at Portsmouth. But he
evidently underwent persecution for righteousness' sake at the
college, which was then (say about 1820) in a bad condition. Of
this, though he was never querulous, his letters bore the traces,
and I cannot but think they must have exercised upon me some kind
of influence for good. As to miscellaneous notices, I had a great
affinity with the trades of joiners and of bricklayers. Physically
I must have been rather tough, for my brother John took me down at
about ten years old to wrestle in the stables with an older lad of
that region, whom I threw. Among our greatest enjoyments were
undoubtedly the annual Guy Fawkes bonfires, for which we had always
liberal allowances of wreck timber and a tar-barrel. I remember
seeing, when about eight or nine, my first case of a dead body. It
was the child of the head gardener Derbyshire, and was laid in the
cottage bed by tender hands, with nice and clean accompaniments.
It seemed to me pleasing, and in no way repelled me; but it made no
deep impression. And now I remember that I used to teach pretty
regularly on Sundays in the Sunday-school built by my father near
the Primrose bridge. It was, I think, a duty done not under
constraint, but I can recollect nothing which associates it with a
seriously religious life in myself.[8]

II

GENEALOGY

To these