rtain peculiarities in me which she took at
first to be indications of precocious genius. After a time, however, she
consulted an eminent physician, who informed her that they were really
symptoms of a disordered circulation. He added that I was in a fair way
to become feeble in mind and deformed in body, and strongly advised that
I should be sent to school, where my brain would be in less danger of
injudicious stimulation. He declared that even my life was at stake. My
father, much alarmed, took one of his prompt decisions. He feared to
trust so delicate a child away from home, and therefore resolved to take
a house in Brighton for a year or two, from which I might attend my
brother's school. The Kensington house was let, and my mother and sister
settled in Sussex Square, a few doors from Mr. Guest. My father, unable
to leave his work, took a lodging in town and came to Brighton for
Sundays, or occasionally twice a week. In those days the journey was
still by coach. When the railway began running in the course of 1841, I
find my father complaining that it could not be trusted, and had yet
made all other modes of travelling impossible. 'How many men turned of
fifty,' asks my brother, 'would have put themselves to such
inconvenience, discomfort, and separation from their wives for the sake
of screening a delicate lad from some of the troubles of a carefully
managed boarding school?' My brother was not aware of the apparent
gravity of the case when he wrote this. Such a measure would have pushed
parental tenderness to weakness had there been only a question of
comfort; but my father was seriously alarmed, and I can only think of
his conduct with the deepest gratitude.

To Fitzjames the plan brought the advantage that he became his father's
companion in Sunday strolls over the Downs. His father now found, as my
mother's diary remarks, that he could already talk to him as to a man,
and Fitzjames became dimly aware that there were difficulties about Mr.
Guest's theology. He went with my father, too, to hear Mr. Sortaine, a
popular preacher whose favourite topic was the denunciation of popery.
My father explained to the boy that some able men really defended the
doctrine of transubstantiation, and my brother, as he remarks, could not
then suspect that under certain conditions very able men like nonsense,
and are even not averse to 'impudent lying,' in defence of their own
authority. Incidentally, too, my father said that there