than had
been expected or intended.' He no doubt became a most dignified Head,
and inspired the young men with fear and respect; but he must have
sometimes remembered the awful day when he first preached before his
father, who immediately turned his back on the divine, saying
afterwards: 'I thank you, Theo, for your discourse; let us hereafter
have less rhetoric and more divinity; I turned my back lest my presence
might daunt you.' When Theo in turn was an old man, and when Jane
Austen's eldest brother went to Oxford, he was asked to dine with this
dignified kinsman. Being a raw freshman, he was about to take off his
gown, when the old man of eighty said with a grim smile: 'Young man, you
need not strip; we are not going to fight.'[10]

Cassandra Leigh's youth was spent in the quiet rectory of Harpsden, for
her father was one of the more conscientious of the gently born clergy
of that day, living entirely on his benefice, and greatly beloved in his
neighbourhood as an exemplary parish-priest. 'He was one of the most
contented, quiet, sweet-tempered, generous, cheerful men I ever knew,'
so says the chronicler of the Leigh family, 'and his wife was his
counterpart. The spirit of the pugnacious Theophilus dwelt not in him;
nor that eternal love of company which distinguished the other brothers,
yet he was by no means unsocial.' Towards the end of his life he removed
to Bath, being severely afflicted with the gout, and here he died in
1763. His peaceful wife, Jane Walker, was descended on her mother's
side from a sufficiently warlike family; she was the daughter of an
Oxford physician, who had married a Miss Perrot, one of the last of a
very old stock, long settled in Oxfordshire, but also known in
Pembrokeshire at least as early as the fourteenth century. They were
probably among the settlers planted there to overawe the Welsh, and it
is recorded of one of them that he slew 'twenty-six men of Kemaes and
one wolf.' A contrast to these uncompromising ancestors was found in
Mrs. Leigh's aunt, Ann Perrot, one of the family circle at Harpsden,
whom tradition states to have been a very pious, good woman. Unselfish
she certainly was, for she earnestly begged her brother, Mr. Thomas
Perrot, to alter his will by which he had bequeathed to her his estates
at Northleigh in Oxfordshire, and to leave her instead an annuity of one
hundred pounds. Her brother complied with her request, and by a codicil
devised the estates to his great-n