t, read 'Manfred'), and
she kept up for years a correspondence with a monk of the hospital on
the St. Bernard. Her first child, Herbert Venn Stephen, was born
September 30, 1822; and about this time a change took place in my
father's position. He had a severe illness, caused, it was thought, by
over-work. He had for a time to give up his chancery business and then
to consider whether he should return to it and abandon the Colonial
Office, or give up the bar to take a less precarious position now
offered to him in the office. His doubts of health and his new
responsibilities as a father decided him. On January 25, 1825, he was
appointed Counsel to the Colonial Office, and on August 2 following
Counsel to the Board of Trade, receiving 1,500_l._ a year for the two
offices, and abandoning his private practice. A daughter, Frances
Wilberforce, was born on September 8, 1824, but died on July 22
following. A quaint portrait in which she is represented with her elder
brother, in a bower of roses, is all that remains to commemorate her
brief existence. For some time Herbert was an only son; and a delicate
constitution made his education very difficult. My father hit upon the
most successful of several plans for the benefit of his children when,
at the beginning of 1829, he made arrangements under which Frederick
Waymouth Gibbs became an inmate of our family in order to give my
brother a companion. Although this plan was changed three years later,
Frederick Gibbs became, as he has ever since remained, a kind of adopted
brother to us, and was in due time in the closest intimacy with my
brother James Fitzjames.

After his acceptance of the permanent appointment my father's energies
were for twenty-two years devoted entirely to the Colonial Office. I
must dwell at some length upon his character and position, partly for
his sake and partly because it is impossible without understanding them
to understand my brother's career.

My brother's whole life was profoundly affected, as he fully recognised,
by his father's influence. Fitzjames prefixed a short life of my father
to a posthumous edition of the 'Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.' The
concluding sentence is significant of the writer's mood. 'Of Sir James
Stephen's private life and character,' he says, 'nothing is said here,
as these are matters with which the public has no concern, and on which
the evidence of his son would not be impartial.' My brother would, I
think, have ch