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to go and see him as a little boy, and sit talking to him while he smoked his long "churchwarden" pipes. He was very much marked with the small-pox, and as he smoked used to rest the end of his pipe-stem against his face so as not to be incommoded by the smoke trickling from it. My father imagined that the scars of the small-pox on his face were caused by this habit, and thought that the old gentleman, indifferent about his complexion, preferred to persist in doing this, although each time he did so a fresh scar was the result.

One of my father's earliest recollections, stamped on his mind by childish terror, is that as he played one evening by the nursery windows in Lombard Street, Birmingham, looking out on the red-lighted windows of the laboratory, -a building, formerly a coach-house, which stood at the end of the garden,—a muffled explosion was heard, the glass of the laboratory windows flew out and descended in a tinkling shower, and a great burst of white smoke volleyed out through the panes; a moment later he saw his mother, white-faced, run down the path, and in a few minutes she returned with the laboratory assistant half leading, half supporting his father between them, his face streaming with blood, up the garden paths. Some detonating powder in a mortar had exploded; the room was all wrecked; a ledger on the table cut in two: his father was long and seriously ill from the shock, but his eyesight was not permanently injured as, foreseeing the explosion, he had had time to shelter his face with his hands. My father had been with him in the laboratory, during the progress of the experiment, a few moments before.

Shortly after this my grandfather, wishing to augment his modest revenues, accepted the Managership of large alkali works at Stoke near Droitwich, which had been lately built and contained what was then said to be the

tallest chimney in England. He thereupon settled at Wychbold, a little rustic village near Droitwich, not far from the little Church of Upton. The whole region was then quieter and more pastoral than it is now. A pleasant road, now disfigured by a raised footpath of cinders, leads from Droitwich to Upton; near the road in the hamlet of Wychbold is a comfortable modern house now called Elm Court. This in the thirties was a low irregular timbered house called Ivy Cottage, and was occupied by Mr Benson, or as he was called in the neighbourhood, Mr White Benson. Next to Ivy Cottage is a quaint gabled farmhouse, with black oak timbers, standing back from the road.

Ivy Cottage had a large garden and was overshadowed by tall trees; at the end of the garden stood a building, formerly a stable, used by my grandfather as a laboratory for chemical experiments. When I visited Wychbold some time ago, I found an old man who remembered him and said of him enthusiastically, "Yes, he was the first man who made lucifer matches in England." It was true that he had a small manufactory of matches in 1828, which he retained until his accident; but I do not imagine that he was the first, though perhaps among the earliest, to produce lucifers.

The Stoke works were a couple of miles away from Wychbold; my grandfather preferred the country air of Upton for himself and his young family, being glad of the walk to and from the works morning and evening. Ivy Cottage soon proved too small for the growing family; he therefore took a farm-house close to Wychbold called Brook House, a simple old-fashioned red-brick grange. The farm-buildings were used by a neighbouring farmer; but my grandfather retained the pleasant sunny garden, with a little ha-ha looking over some fields, at the bottom

of which ran the brook from which the house took its name. There were old orchard trees all about, and a great climbing pear-tree on the wall of the dairy.

With this house most of my father's early memories were connected. It was not a large house, there being but a parlour and dining-room, a little room upstairs, called the book-room, where my grandfather worked, and a few bed-rooms. Here my father could recollect being taken upstairs every Sunday, after the early dinner, and lifted in his father's arms, to look at an engraving of Paracelsus, a philosopher for whom my father had a great admiration and affection in later years: the picture always hung close to his desk at Addington. The worn aspect of the man with his long nose, deep-set eyes, and expression of painful expectation impressed itself very deeply on his childish mind.

My father's early recollections of Church at Upton are curious and worth recording: (I noted them down from his talk in 1878) the Church was aisleless, and the middle passage with high pews on each side led up to the Chancel-arch in which was a three-decker fifteen feet high. The clerk wore a wig and immense horn spectacles. He was a shoemaker, dressed in black, with a white tie. Some of the pews were long, some square; their own was the latter. In the gallery there sat "the music"a clarionet, flute, violin and 'cello; the clerk gave out "20th Psalm of David" and the fiddles tuned for a moment and then played it once. Then they struck up, and the clerk, absolutely alone, in a majestic voice which swayed up and down without regard to time, sang it through, like the braying of an ass: not a soul else joined in; the farmers amused and smiling at each other; my grandfather standing upright like a pillar, without a smile.

My father used often to describe to us his recollections of my grandfather. He was a pale slim man with large

eyes, very like his cousins the Sidgwicks-there is a strong resemblance in his portrait to Professor Henry Sidgwick. In 1890 my father met Professor Tyndall for the first time at the Bel Alp in Switzerland, and made great friends with him. He said to me afterwards that Professor Tyndall both in face and manner recalled his father to him so strongly that he took to him the moment he saw him. He must have been a man of great force of character; he was a strong Evangelical Churchman, and a man of singular unworldliness and piety. He was a total abstainer of an almost bigoted type; in one of his many serious illnesses he refused all stimulants, and was only saved by an energetic doctor who poured brandy down his throat when he had sunk into semi-unconsciousness. One of his characteristics was a horror, inherited by my father, of talking about money-matters, which he thought highly improper. But this reticence led afterwards to a serious catastrophe which will be related later.

My grandfather dressed very precisely in black-a low waistcoat showing a frilled front, a black stock, a dress coat, with a bunch of seals dangling from his fob; black pantaloons with white stockings; pumps in the house; out of doors he wore high boots and a large carefully-brushed beaver hat and black gloves. This precise attention to details of dress was imbibed by my father, who used, we thought as children, to be unnecessarily exacting in the matter of hats and gloves. I well recollect, the first time he came down to see me at Eton, the unintentional misery he caused me, then a very untidy lower boy, by brushing the collar of my jacket in the playing-fields before several of my friends.

My father was at first a sickly child; but a long holiday spent at Rampside, near Barrow-in-Furness, with his cousin the Rev. William Sidgwick, who had a curacy

[graphic][subsumed]

E. W. BENSON (SEN.), THE ARCHBISHOP'S FATHER.

From a

pencil sketch.

To face page 10, vol. i

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