er conversation
proved her to possess a full share of the family talents, and although,
like her sister, she suffered from deafness, a talk with her was, to my
mind at least, as great a treat as a talk with the most famous
performers in the social art. After her husband's death, she was
watched by her youngest son, Frank, who had become an artist, with a
tender affection such as is more frequently exhibited by a daughter to
an infirm father. She died on October 28, 1878, and has been followed by
two of her sons, Henry and Frank. The two surviving sons, Edward and
Albert Venn Dicey, Vinerian professor of Law at Oxford, are both well
known in the literary and political world.

I must now tell so much as I know, and is relevant to my purpose, of my
father's life. James Stephen, fourth at least of the name, and third son
of the Master, was born January 3, 1789, at Lambeth, during his father's
visit to England. He had an attack of small-pox during his infancy,
which left a permanent weakness of eyesight. The Master's experience had
not taught him the evils of desultory education. James, the younger,
was, I believe, under various schoolmasters, of whom I can only mention
John Prior Estlin, of St. Michael's Hill, Bristol, a Unitarian, and the
Rev. H. Jowett, of Little Dunham, Norfolk, who was one of the adherents
to Evangelicalism. The change probably marks the development of his
father's convictions. He entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1806. At
that time the great Evangelical leader at Cambridge was Isaac Milner,
the President of Queens' College. Milner's chief followers were William
Farish, of Magdalene, and Joseph Jowett, of Trinity Hall, both of them
professors. Farish, as I have said, married my grandfather's sister, and
the colleges were probably selected for my father and his brother George
with a view to the influence of these representatives of the true faith.
The 'three or four years during which I lived on the banks of the Cam,'
said my father afterwards,[23] 'were passed in a very pleasant, though
not a very cheap, hotel. But had they been passed at the Clarendon, in
Bond Street, I do not think that the exchange would have deprived me of
any aids for intellectual discipline or for acquiring literary and
scientific knowledge.' That he was not quite idle I infer from a copy of
Brotier's 'Tacitus' in my possession with an inscription testifying that
it was given to him as a college prize. He took no university honou