thought except for our happiness. Parker, the most genial and thoughtful of friends, was our butler at Wellington and Truro, and became our porter at Lambeth on the first vacancy, when Lipscomb, his stately predecessor at the Morton's Tower, went to be Warden of the Whitgift Hospital; Maclean, the Scotch coachman at Truro; Wyatt, the dignified Lambeth coachman whose wig became him well; Newberry, the major-domo who served three Archbishops with upright fidelity; Brim, once my father's valet and afterwards his butler; Whalley, the Scotch bailiff at Addington; Mrs Cave, my mother's maid; Mrs Jones the housekeeper; Sarah Stevens, the first housemaid at Lambeth, who came with us from Truro,-were some among many devoted servants, several of them most religiousminded men and women, whom it was our privilege to have about us. My father studied their ways, thought of them, talked to them and about them, showed his gratitude for their devotion, and won their faithful love. Servants stayed long with us, returned to us, and in after days visited us; the relations between them and my father were never formal, rather patriarchal in character. Nothing, again, was more eager than the way in which he threw himself into the interests of his children, and this increased rather than diminished as time went on, and as his sympathies widened. He said to me once that he had been late in discovering that one cannot alter the decided bent of a character, and the interest he took in my brother Fred's writings was an instance of this. He did not care for fiction, still less for fashionable fiction; but he read my brother's books with a candid admiration for their élan, their vigour, though with a kind of mystification as to whence those qualities were inherited; and he was intensely amused to hear a report that he himself had read Dodo "with the tears streaming down his cheeks." B. I. 41 Though he welcomed warmly any new line, any fresh developement, which might be alien though not opposed to his own, he loved perhaps above all to recognise the fruit of seeds which he himself had sown, the upshot of interests which he himself had implanted in us. While I was still a boy at Eton, he used to encourage me to send him anything I wrote, translations or original poetry, and he returned them carefully corrected with many suggestions. And one can hardly express with what graciousness he received and with what tenderness he valued the firstfruits of one's work,-as when I was able to present to him my first book of poems which I had dedicated to himself. Again he had always desired that one at least of his sons should take Orders; he never urged it; but when the choice was voluntarily made by my youngest brother it will be seen with what heartfelt joy he welcomed it. He used to be preoccupied with deep anxiety with regard to his children. My mother has told me that before she went down to breakfast, he would pray at his prie-dieu, in the simplest and most affecting way, mentioning one after another of his family by name, and praying for their special needs to be supplied. At the same time he often exaggerated trivial points, thinking them to be indications of character and bent, even when they were quite fortuitous. I remember a little instance of this when we were all staying at Porlock Weir; I was then an Eton boy and suffered for some days from toothache, which I did not happen to mention; and finding that it was painful to open my mouth, went two or three walks with him and others but said nothing; he made himself very unhappy over this and came to the conclusion I had something on my mind which I could not tell him-so indeed I had, but it was only a toothache. He used to lament sometimes, if one of his children happened to be silent or preoccupied, over their uncommunicativeness, and say that he did not possess their confidence; indeed his sensitiveness to the way in which he was regarded by any member of his home circle was quite extraordinary and never diminished. Shortly after the death of my eldest sister, he asked our dear friend Lucy Tait, whose sister was married, to come and make her home with us, and from the moment that she entered our household she was to him as a beloved daughter. With very different traditions and instincts they often had heated arguments on points about which they disagreed. On one occasion she and my father had a difference about felling timber in the Park; he was anxious to open up views, while she disliked the trees being removed; there was a contention between them, and he spoke strongly, but atoned for it a few days afterwards by presenting her, with a smile, with a little axe made after his own design. But it is impossible to exaggerate the intense delight that my father took in family life. Indeed it played so large a part in his whole career that it is difficult to imagine him without it. He always wanted as many as possible of his family to be with him. When he first went to Wellington my mother was for years the daily companion of his walks. As his children grew older, he always wished to have them about him and with him; he was not content with one companion, but always desired that all should be there. 'My dearest love to the dearests," he wrote to my mother on one of his visits to London in 1881,-" I think I ought always to have one with me here. They could go into a state of coma when I went out, and thus would not find it dull." In a similar letter, looking forward to his return to Kenwyn, he wrote: "I had rather teach Hugh Greek, or walk with the girls, than anything else and would promise not to be idle!" And again in more serious strain;-"How little we knew of the intense brightness which was shining over us at Wellington College! What the blessings to us of those children were! And now I do not know how to look on to the years without little children." He was fond, as I have said, of playing writing games with us in the evening in holidays; every member of the party wrote a question: the questions were then shaken together and distributed, and answered in verse by other members of the party. But his great pleasure was to have everything written by the others read over more than once, and to express his appreciation. The following are some instances of his versifying. In answer to the question Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? the Archbishop wrote: Alas! my spells are earthy of the earth; Or harsh metallic powers, whose utmost worth Quickens or lays to rest; their true consent But a diseased soul is Heaven in trouble; You but behold it mirrored in a glass- Past time and space and all created dower, In answer to What is the most threatening cloud on the political horizon? he wrote in 1891 "Before thy temple, goddess pure, Thou standest, and thy helmet plume "Athena! down from Macedon, To where sharp Malea parts the seas, "Wherein some fount of wrathful fire Lurks, or some deluge of cyclone, One breath just curled that lip divine, A sudden moisture dewed the eyes- "Nowhence but from within the curse That wrecks the temple and the state- "Let rulers by the crowd be ruled: Let law's high dooms be falsely spoke, "Farewell"—the plume in thunder waved The mighty lip was still once more- |