all men knew that he was to his children and servants a yet 'finer gentleman,' to use the grand old English word he loved to use, than he was in the finest circles," "Pitiful and courteous" - he carried out this apostolic precept in his home; and however difficult life might be to himself, his daily care was to make it easy to those around him. Like a brave man as he was, he kept his feelings of depression, and those dark hours of wrestling with doubt and disappointment and anxiety, which must come to every thinking, feeling human being, within the sanctuary of his own heart, unveiled only to one on earth, and to his Father in Heaven. And when he came out of his study in the morning, and met his children and guests at breakfast, he would greet them with bright courtesy and that cheerful disengaged temper acquired by strict self-discipline, which enabled him to enter into all their interests, and the joy and playfulness of the moment. The family gatherings were the brightest hours in the day, lit up as they were with his marvellous humor. Bright - not only because of the joy his great heart took in his nearest and dearest but bright on the Bible principle that "a merry heart is a continual feast," and sunshine necessary to the development and actual health and growth of all things, especially the young. "I wonder," he would say, "if there is so much laughing in any other home in England as in ours." He became a lighthearted boy once more in the presence of his children, and still more remarkably so in that of his aged mother, when he saw her face clouded. with depression during her later years, which were spent under his roof. He brought sunshine

The Training of Love

41 into her room whenever he entered it, as well as the strong spiritual consolation which she needed, and received in his daily ministrations by her bedside morning and evening.

The griefs of children were to him most piteous. "A child over a broken toy is a sight I cannot bear;" and when nursery griefs and broken toys were taken to the study, he was never too busy to mend the toy and dry the tears. He held with Jean Paul Richter again, that children have their "days and hours of rain," days when "the child's quicksilver" falls rapidly before the storms and cold weather of circumstances, and "parents should not consider or take much notice, either for anxiety or sermons," but lightly pass over these variations of temperature, except where they are symptoms of coming illness. And here his knowledge of physiology and that delicate organization of brain, which had given him many a sad experience in his own childhood, made him keen to watch and detect such symptoms. Weariness at lessons, and sudden fits of temper, he would say, often spring from purely physical causes, and must not be treated hastily as moral, far less spiritual delinquencies, being, possibly, mere phases of depression, which disappear with change of occupation, air and scene, and the temporary cessation of all brain work.

Justice and mercy, and that rigid self-control, which kept him from speaking a hasty word or harboring a mean suspicion, combined with a divine tenderness, were his governing principles in all his home relationships. "This tenderness," as once was said of a great man,

1 "Levana," chap. &

was

never so marked as when he was looking at or talking with little children. At such times the expression which came over his face was wonderfully beautiful and touching. Towards these

little creatures he had an eager way of stretching out his hands, as if to touch them, but with a hesitation arising from the evident dread of handling them too roughly. The same sort of feeling, too, he manifested in a minor degree, towards small animals, little dogs, kittens and birds."1

It has been observed with truth that there was an "element of fierceness," about him, which would flash out in the presence of wrong and oppression, of meanness and untruth, and betray itself by abrupt and fierce rejoinder. But in the home which he had made the very atmosphere of truth and love, of confidence and freedom of opinion, he was never abrupt, but tender, courteous and self-forgetful, yielding to every will and temper but his own. And he respected as well as loved his children, from the early days when Heaven lay about them in their infancy, and he hung with reverent and yet passionate wonder over the baby in its cradle, to grown-up years when he looked upon them as friends and equals. Home was to them so real a thing that it seemed in a way as if it must be eternal. And when his eldest son, in America, heard of the father's death, and of another which then seemed imminent, and foresaw the break-up of the home, he stood as one astonished, only to say, in the bitterness of his soul:

"I feel as if a huge ship had broken up piece by piece, plank by plank, and we children were left cling1 Life of Sir W. Napier.

The Training of Love

43

ing to one strong spar alone - God! . . . Ah, how many shoals and quicksands of life he piloted me through, by his wonderful love, knowledge, and endurthat great father of ours, the dust of whose shoes we are not worthy to kiss.

ance

Since that bitter day, this beloved son has added his memories to the many in this book of memories:

"Perfect love casteth out all fear,' was the motto on which my father based his theory of bringing up his children; and this theory he put in practice from their babyhood till when he left them as men and women. From this, and from the interest he took in all their pursuits, their pleasures, trials, and even the petty details of their every-day life, there sprang up a 'friendship' between father and children that increased in intensity and depth with years. To speak for myself, and yet I know full well I speak for all, he was the best friend the only true friend I ever had. At once he was the most fatherly and the most unfatherly of fathers -fatherly in that he was our intimate friend, and our self-constituted adviser; unfatherly in that our feeling for him lacked that fear and restraint that make boys call their father 'the governor.'

"I remember him as essentially the same to all of us always: utterly unchanged and unchanging since the time that he used to draw Sunday pictures for us to the time when he treated us as men and women of the world. Ours was the only household I ever saw in which there was no favoritism. It seemed as if in each of our different characters he took an equal pride, while he fully recognized their different traits of good or evil; for, instead of having one code of social, moral, and physical laws laid down for one and all of us, each child became a separate study for him; and its little

'diseases au moral,' as he called them, were treated differently according to each different temperament.

"The time above all others in which he opened out his heart to us, I think, was walking over on Sunday evenings to the services held in the little school-room at Bramshill. I can see him now, on one of those many summer evenings, as he strode out of the back garden gate with a sorrowful 'No! go home, Sweep!' to the retriever that had followed us stealthily down the walk, and who now stood with an ear cocked, and one paw up, hoping against hope, that he might be allowed to come on. I can feel him striding by me in the narrow path, while from the bright sky and the look of the country he drank in nature, till his eye lit up, his chest expanded, his step grew elastic, and he was a boy again with me. I can hear him tell me, at the bottom of the field, of a heavy fall out hunting over the fence into the meadow, and his ringing laugh at the recollection of his own mishap. His cheery Good afternoon' to the cottager at the corner; the Well-done, boy,' and grim smile of approval, with which he greeted a jump over the gate at the top of the hill, on which he sits a moment to take in the long sweeps of purple heather running down to the yellow corn land the brown roof of the Rectory bursting up among its trees-the long flats of the little valley, with its greens and cricketers. 'For cricket,' he used to say, 'is better than beer, and the poor lads don't get a chance to play on week-day : but remember you do.' And then the walk on over the moor, chatting gaily of the fox's earth hard by, the green tiger beetle that whirred from under our feet, the night-jar (goat-sucker) that fluttered up from a sandy place in the path, and swooped madly away among the fir-trees, while ever and anon some thought would strike a deeper chord, and a few words put something that mayhap had been an old stumbling-block, into an en