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Ever since I was a small child, the sea, and a ship sailing on the sea, and nearly all the things that belong to the sea, have had for me a poignant emotional fascination. The sights and sounds and odours of sailing ships, with the memories of harbours and wharves, seem woven into my mental texture. Whenever I come back to them it is with something of the same emotion that everything still gives me that was once my mother's. I know that as long as I live there will be no more beautiful thing in the world for me than a finely cut ship, sailing with full-bellied sails, bound for mysterious shores. It is perhaps fitting that such a sight should be so moving to one who has been a pioneer on unknown seas of the spirit, haunted by the longing to search out remote lands that no keel has yet touched.

But to explain the fascination that ships and the sea hold for me I need not fall back on their symbolism. The real associations have themselves been early enough to explain it all. I was only seven when my father first took me with him to sail round the world, and some ten years later he took me again. I can, moreover, trace the sea far back in the traditions of my family on both sides. My father was a sea-captain who lived for fifty years on the sea. His father and all his brothers spent their lives as officials in the warehouses of the London Docks, in constant contact with ships, and all the rich and wonderful products of the East that are there piled up in legendary profusion. My mother was the daughter of a sea-captain, her only brother was lost on his first voyage at sea, in a ship that was never heard of again, her grandfather was both sailor and ship-builder, and most of his family were sailors. Thus all my near male relations in the generations immediately preceding me—all whom I ever heard of in youth—have lived on or by the sea.

Behind my sailor ancestors—again along both sides, for my father's father and my mother's mother were first cousins—there are, for the most part, long rows of often scholarly divines and parish priests, away from the sea, and springing mostly from old families seated on the land and all in Suffolk. It is strange that I knew nothing whatever of this ancestry until, after I had reached the age of forty, my father put some old family papers into my hands. Until then my knowledge of these ancestors had been confined to the bare facts that the names Peppen and Powle, borne by my father and one of his brothers, were surnames which entered into the family history at some unknown period. The few papers my father gave me served as a clue to various lines of ancestry which I am still slowly unravelling.

It has long been my belief that a man's aptitudes and temperament are rooted in fundamental characteristics of even remote ancestors. I know that theoretically nearly the whole of a man's heredity must be supplied by his immediate ascendants: his parents and grandparents, and so, in most cases, I doubt not it practically happens. But the germinal possibilities of heredity from more remote ancestors, though in most people latent throughout life, may here and there in a sensitive perhaps slightly abnormal individual spring into life, rise to the level of consciousness, and enter into new emotional and intellectual combinations. Recent theories of heredity seem to make this more rather than less intelligible. Thus it is, perhaps, that in the sphere of genius for instance, to which I have given some attention, a man totally unlike his parents may yet appear to us, and truly appear, as a marvellous incarnation of the typical characteristics of his race. For these and the like reasons I have always sought out carefully the ancestry of the men whom I have desired to study. It has been a novel and fascinating task to work out the same problem in myself. I even propose to devote a book to it, and that design, even if never carried out, may dispense me from entering into any tedious details here. It will be enough to set forth briefly what appear to be the main characteristics of the half-dozen families which I regard as the streams which have fed my own fundamental inborn personality. As I knew nothing whatever of them, or their histories before the nineteenth century, until my own life was definitely moulded, and perhaps its chief episodes already lived, there can be no question of the consciously plastic force of tradition; if these people have influenced me at all, as many curious points of contact seem to show, this influence cannot have been that of example, but altogether unconscious and organic.

The document, handed down in my father's family, which awakened in me the desire, never felt in my life before, to make a voyage of exploration among my ancestors, was the parchment will, proved in 1736, of Susannah Peppen, wife of the Rev. Richard Peppen, Rector of Great Waldingfield, and daughter of the Rev. William Powle, formerly Rector of the same Suffolk village and also of Little Waldingfield near by. I soon set out for Great Waldingfield, which I had never before heard of, accompanied by my old friend Dr. Barker Smith, and found a pleasant village, a few miles out of Sudbury, once a little centre of Puritanism and the home of the New England Appletons. No one there had ever heard of Peppens and of Powles, but as we wandered over the churchyard Barker Smith speedily detected, in perfect preservation, the altar tomb in slate of William Powle with a long and interesting Latin inscription. That was the starting-point of an investigation which in leisure moments I have pursued with considerable ardour and success, aided by various fortunate and fortuitous circumstances, as well as by a certain sense for research, assiduously developed in quite other fields. In a few years I had constructed on a solid foundation the history in its main lines of several families, and elucidated the lives of two or three remarkable men.

A figure I look back at with pleasure is that of Richard Peppen's grandfather, the Rev. William Keble, B.D., Rector of Ringshall in Suffolk, and at one time fellow of Bene't College (now Corpus Christi), Cambridge, a victim of Puritanism who has his niche in Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy. The Kebles were a vigorous and independent stock, a manorial family, settled at Old Newton near Stowmarket, perhaps from before the Norman Conquest. The head of the family was always called "the Heir." At the end of the sixteenth century the Heir was Giles Keble. William, whose outspoken allegiance to King and Church brought him suffering and temporary deprivation of his living, was a younger son of Giles. A still younger son was Richard who has his part in the history of England. On leaving the University, Richard entered at Gray's Inn, became in course of time a distinguished judge and, unlike his brother, took the Parliamentary side; he presided at Lilburne's trial with admirable impartiality, and when the Privy Seal was put into Commission he was appointed one of the Commissioners. But he was unable to accept the despotism of Cromwell and retired to his Suffolk estate at Tuddenham, near Ipswich, a few years later, and long before the Restoration. That doubtless was why he escaped prosecution for treason, though I have not found the slightest reason to suspect that he was (as some have supposed) one of the Regicides. Some have said he fled to Switzerland, like one of his fellow Commissioners who was murdered at Vevey by Royalists, but the men of this stock were not accustomed to fly from possible dangers, and there are various indications that he remained in the absolute seclusion of his Suffolk home, far from the changes and turmoils of the world, though there is what seems a deliberate vagueness in the inscription on the tablet set up to him by his daughter in the chancel of Tuddenham Church.*

[* The biographers of John Keble, author of the Christian Year, state that he was descended from the Right Hon. Richard Keble, but the assertion is baseless. John Keble belonged to the Gloucestershire family of that name, and though it is not unlikely that the Gloucestershire Kebles came from the Suffolk stock, since both districts were engaged in the same cloth industries (and I find a man of the name of the rare Peppen family also in Gloucestershire), the separation must have taken place before the seventeenth century.]

Naturally the Rector of Ringshall's uncompromising attitude provoked unpleasant attentions from the Puritans. Again and again they plundered him or at least stile his horses; once they pounced down on the Rectory and on searching it found it full of pamphlets on the King's side with not one on the other side—and it was set down that he had said of the Puritans that they "railed at the Pope, yet are Popes themselves, doing what they list," and again that "if a cobbler or a tinker get into the pulpit and preach four or five hours for the Parliament, these are the men nowadays."* Finally, in 1644, he was turned out of his cure, but, as Walker carefully neglects to say, he was reinstated next year, apparently through the intervention of Mr. Keble's brother, the Judge, who was influential on the Parliamentary side. Possibly he reconciled himself to the new order. He died at an advanced age, and in the Parish Register there is an unusual entry concerning this "anchient and revered Divine" who, we are told, was Rector "by the space of fifty years and upwards (in reality not more than forty-eight years), and he is described as "a Pastor most faithful in the service of his Master Jesus Christ, most legal to his prince, very peaceable and exemplary among his parishioners, very pitiful and charitable towards the poore, very charitable to strangers, and most courteous to all honest-minded men." It is interesting to see the tribute to his loyalty combined with a subsequent statement that his funeral sermon was preached by Fairfax, who was a leading Puritan divine in the Eastern Counties! Evidently the bitter antagonism of earlier years had been mellowed. This was in 1659. Had old Keble lived a year longer his ears would have been gladdened by the sound of the bells that announced the return of the King and the Bishops. His will is a concise and businesslike document; there is not a word of complaint, and only one personal note can be traced; the old man—evidently remembering how Gresham had devastated the neighbouring county to get timber for his Royal Exchange—directs that on his estate the trees are not to be felled; the landmarks of the old order had been swept away, but, he seems to say, the trees at least shall remain. He bequeathed the advowson of the living to his daughter Susannah. She speedily presented it and herself to the Rev. George Peppen.

[* John Walker, An Attempt Towards Recovering an Account of the Number and the Sufferings of the Clergy in the Later Times of the Great Rebellion, 1914, Part II, p. 289. "There are numerous documents dealing with Keble's affair in the Bodleian Library which the Rev. F. Compston has kindly examined and summarised for me."]

I do not know precisely who was the father of George Peppen but I can trace him to Wenhaston, a village with an interesting old church some five miles from the Suffolk coast, which was then the home of the Peppen or Pepyn family. They were a small family which never branched out far, though in earlier ages it seems to have been somewhat more numerous, for Pembury in Kent is a corruption of "Peppenbury." In the seventeenth century, and after, so far as I can find, there was no other recognisable family of Peppens in England, and now, it is probable, there are no Peppens at all. I imagine that they were Walloons who, like so many others, came to England at some period earlier than the sixteenth century. Ever since the time of the famous father of Charlemagne Pepin has been, as it still is, a common name round Liège. The curious point about these English Peppens is their constant devotion to the Church; we scarcely hear of them in any other connection; at Wenhaston their name is only found as that of church-wardens; just before the Reformation Dom Robertus Pepyn was Rector of Knoddeshall not far away from his native Wenhaston, where he expressed a wish to be buried, a piety towards the past also characteristic of these Peppens. And now George Peppen was the founder of an almost exclusively clerical family; his three sons were all rectors of Suffolk parishes; at Ringshall four generations of Peppens peacefully ruled in succession. The last, who died in 1789, married the daughter of a Knight, Sir William Barker, acquired a coat of arms with a Pegasus as crest and now reposes beneath a large grave-stone with a long inscription at the west end of Ringshall Church. A son of George Peppen's was that Richard who, like his father, married a wife with a living in her gift and became, as his father had once been, Rector of Great Waldingfield. With his arrival, however, the presentation to the living passed into the hands of a Cambridge College so that his son Powle Peppen was not brought up to succeed his father. He settled in Edwardstone, the beautiful village in which John Winthrop, the founder of Massachussetts, was born. There he became a farmer, maltster, and farrier. His two children were both daughters, one noted for her prettiness, the other for her cleverness. They each became my great-grandmother, for the clever one married an Ellis of Sudbury, and the pretty one an Oliver of Bury. In abandoning the Church the Peppens in the male line became extinct.

The Peppens, as I view them, take on a definite family character. Their devotion to the Church seems to have been on the one hand without any ecclesiastical ambition, and on the other, it may be, without any extreme religious devotion. They sought and found—on at least two occasions by the road of marriage—Church livings of more than average value which were quiet and comfortable country estates, and they felt no disdain for the worldly advantages of good county alliances and a coat of arms. I take it that they were men of good ability, yet nowise standing conspicuously beyond their fellows. They were all Cambridge men, all content with their M.A. degree. They seem to have been faithful and grateful friends; the Ringshall Registers contain a pleasant and, I doubt not, reliable account of the virtues of William Keble, such as one seldom finds in such registers, and there can be little doubt that George Peppen wrote it; while his son Richard surely wrote the eloquent Latin epitaph which records the many fine qualities of William Powle. The Peppens had a certain pertinacity of character, even obstinacy, as shown by their attachment to the Church and well illustrated by Richard Peppen, who, before becoming Rector of Great Waldingfield, was Head Master of the Grammar School at Needham Market. Here he would insist on preaching in neighbouring churches, although the managers of the Grammar School maintained that he should devote his whole time and attention to the school. It was a dispute which, I understand, has continued to appear even in modern schools with clerical heads. In this case the Head Master was repeatedly called to order and severely admonished, but he continued imperturbably on his own way. The history of the conflict was contained in the minute books of the school which, unfortunately, have disappeared in recent years.

Of all these families it is the Fowles I know most about. They belonged to Bury St. Edmunds, and in the fifteenth century they called themselves Bocher, indicating that they had once been butchers (which then meant primarily graziers). They are described as yeomen, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century one of them was a plumber, and that was an important occupation at a time and in a region where church building was active and churches must be roofed with lead. These sixteenth-century Bochers, men and women, wrote long and detailed wills, all extant in the Bury Probate Registry, which show that though they were not more than comfortably well off, they were estimable people, thoughtful and kindly for all whom they came into relation with. One charming old lady of the family, Margaret Powle alias Bocher—the women were nearly all Margeries or Margarets in this family—made an unusually long and detailed will which gives the pleasantest picture of her character and surroundings. Every article she possessed, it would seem, every pot and pan, every garment, is separately bequeathed as an affectionate remembrance, often with a befitting word of gratitude or regard, among a large circle of relations, friends, acquaintances, her manservant and her maidservant. To her grandson Paul Powle she leaves, not a brass dish or a pair of shirts, but, perhaps with insight into the boy's character, "ten shillings of good and lawful money," though I may note that his father John Powle left him, in addition to a fair share of his estate in money, "my other clavichord and my lute and some of my singing books," but this Bury yeoman was evidently a most musical man, for beside this clavichord (supposed to be identical with the clavichord which preceded the spinet) he had another, as well as two virginals, and singing books enough to be divided among all his Sins. He was a true Elizabethan, this accomplished musical yeoman, nor was he neglectful of his bow and arrows, though he bequeathed them outside the family, realising, no doubt, that they were growing out of date, and that Paul Powle would prefer a gun. Paul Powle, who was born in 1864, raised the family to a higher social position and acquired a considerable estate. But I regret to say that, though extremely restless and energetic, he was scarcely an amiable or even estimable man. My knowledge of him is extensive and the evidence convincing. He was apparently a lawyer, "Clerk in the Icing's Bench" (and we hear of him being commissioned to make out a deed of conveyance), with chambers in Fleet Street, himself most litigious, and not always strictly scrupulous. For many years he was the neighbour and friend of Adam Winthrop (father of the great New Englander), a lawyer also, lord of the manor of Groton and the auditor of two Cambridge Colleges, an excellent and pious man. In Adam Winthrop's interesting but still unpublished Diary (deposited in the British Museum since this was first written and now printed), as well as in his Almanacks, there are curious and vivid glimpses of Powle's private life. Moreover, since Powle was constantly figuring as plaintiff or defendant in Chancery cases various aspects of his domestic affairs are thus brought before us. Adam Winthrop never says a word which records his opinion of Powle, but he shows that though they were often in association and on friendly terms, and the affairs of his family and Powle's were intimately connected, there were constant disputes between them over leases and bonds and so forth. Sometimes "I was arrested at Mr. Powle's suit," sometimes "Mr. Powle was arrested at my suit," but these disputes seem to have been satisfactorily settled. Powle's first wife belonged to the Vintner family, rich Suffolk clothiers, and hereby also he was in hot water. In 1603 Winthrop mentions that at Bury Sessions Powle bailed his brother-in-law, Zachary Vintner—who was a youth of twenty—charged with burglary, and that Adam Winthrop testified against Zachary; we know from other sources that Zachary was hanged for that misdeed. A few months later we hear that Powle, after sitting in a Commission at Colchester, "was in danger to have been killed by Gilbert Vintner, his wife's brother"—it is not clear why—who two days before had been staying at his brother-in-law's house at Groton. Again, much later, Winthrop mentions that Powle "charged a chimney-sweeper with stealing of a silver cup." It is not certain that Powle was a bad man. I do not think that he was. But he seems to have been a highly energetic and probably neurotic person, devoted to the furtherance of himself and his family, irritable, suspicious, and aggressive, yet constantly regarding himself as the victim of other people's malevolence, a troublesome man for all who had any dealings with him. He is described by his father-in-law as "always quarrelsome," and certainly was so. It must at the same time be said that the wrongs were not all on one side, and it would seem that at that period a considerable proportion of respectable well-to-do people must have been engaged in endeavouring to cheat each other in ways that were often bare-faced and sometimes violent. Powle's young brother-in-law of the first marriage, as I have noted, though of a good family, was hanged for burglary. Three years after the death, within a few days, of his first wife and of his only son by her, he married Sarah Corder, a wealthy yeoman's daughter, who, her father admits, was "much in love." Her dower was to be £400. But twelve years later Corder had not paid his daughter's marriage portion, and Powle brought an action in the King's Bench, and was awarded only £150 by the jury with costs. Then Powle came forward to complain that on that occasion Corder had appeared before the Court in such shabby attire that the jury concluded he was poor. A few years later Powle, having apparently received no satisfaction, brings an action in Chancery against Corder, who pleads in his answer that he had always been hoping for "a better and more friendly disposition" in Powle, but this hope was not realised, and one Sunday while Corder and his aged wife (they were both near eighty) were at church Powle entered their house, debarred their entrance, and thus forced them to seek their lodging in woods and barns. Corder further pleads that Powle had brought an action against him in the Star Chamber which led to his imprisonment in Whitechapel gaol, and while Corder was still there Powle, he alleges, instigated the gaoler's wife with two ruffians to attack him and take his money away. These quarrels are difficult to disentangle. Later in life Powle fell into more serious troubles which are easier to follow.

Powle had purchased the living of Great Waldingfield for the future benefit of his young son John, whom he was sending to Cambridge, and in the meanwhile he rented the Rectory on lease at £40 a year, undertaking the repair of the parsonage, boarding and lodging the rector, Clemson, with fire, washing, and attendance to the value of £20 a year, also paying him to instruct two of his children sometimes over £2. Almost from the first Powle felt that he was being victimised by Clemson. Always mixed up in so many people's affairs, Powle had been executor to the previous rector, Hindes, whose books to the value of £50 had come into the hands of Powle, and he now found them in possession of Clemson, as Clemson admitted, but said they had been left in the Rectory and he knew nothing of Powle's rights to them. Then in 1624 Clemson absented himself, Powle alleged, from his cure for the space of more than four score days, whereupon the lease, according to the law of the realm, becoming void, Powle prepared a new lease, but this disappeared from Powle's desk in the Rectory, and since no one in the house was able to read or write except Clemson, Powle opined that he must have taken it. Clemson on his side denied the allegations and pleaded "that the bill was drawn up in more malice to vex a poor minister, denies he carried away the lease, and before he carried away his books he allowed Powle to examine them himself to manifest his honesty; he wishes the lease to be void and to pay his own duties, etc. Says that Powle when he came to his parsonage house shut him in unarmed and Powle's wife set upon him with her fists most outrageously and Powle struck him a deadly blow with a gun over the forehead, which swelled immediately to the bigness almost of a hen's egg, and the length of a man's finger, and bled some few drops of blood, and afterwards the complainant threw a chamber pot at his head which, had he not fenced off with his arm, it came with such a force, he believeth it would have brained him; then Powle cried 'Kill him!' and his wife cried 'Shoot him!' and Clemson flew out of the house without his hat or cloak." It is satisfactory to find that Powle was able to secure such wholehearted allegiance from his wife, but we see, as indeed we know from many other sources, that in the reign of James I the conduct of ladies and gentlemen was not marked by the same prim propriety as in the reign of the highly respectable Victoria, nor was there any undue excess of reverence for the "sacred cloth." Clemson held the living, however, for five years longer, and then, over his successor, Nicholas Bloxam, Powle fell into the most lamentable troubles of all, fur, as is so often the case with people of his temperament, he was quite incapable of learning by experience. His son John was still too young for the living, so Powle endeavoured meanwhile to extract the utmost profit from it, and in this effort he committed the grievous ecclesiastical sin of simony, aggravated by breach of promise. (A reliable version of the matter is printed, among other cases in the High Court of Commission, by the historian Gardiner in a Camden Society volume.) The parties injured in the matter reported it to the High Court of Commission. Powle, together with Bloxam, was tried before Archbishop Abbot, Laud, and many other bishops. He was found guilty, excommunicated, heavily fined, deprived of his lands, and imprisoned. The deprivation and imprisonment were not part of the original sentence, but Powle was not the man to yield weakly, and I expect that he aggravated the original offence by resistance to the Court. In his defence he admitted the facts but sought to justify them. These admitted facts, however, cover the whole case against him, and the sentence of the High Court was not unjust though it might have been excessive. It is astonishing that a lawyer should have been ignorant of, or indifferent to, so elementary a principle of ecclesiastical law, but in part this may be accounted for by the evil odour which everything ecclesiastical was now acquiring for Puritans, and the Powles, though always Anglican, leaned strongly to the Puritan side which was generally prevalent in Suffolk. The influence of Puritanism in this matter is shown by the fact that eventually the sentence of the Court of Commission in Powle's case was quashed by the House of Lords—surely a much transformed House of Lords—and the case was sent for re-trial to the Suffolk Assizes, I believe at his native Bury, and here a jury, evidently composed of Puritans, brought in a verdict against the bishops and in favour of Powle. It was not a sound verdict, but it was, in a sense, a justification of Powle, and it indicates, moreover, that, turbulent and unscrupulous as his methods appear to our more refined age, he had not lost popular esteem among his own fellow-citizens; they probably regarded him, indeed, as something of a martyr at the hands of a tyrannical Church. In 1636, evidently no longer a prisoner, I find him petitioning Laud, now become Archbishop of Canterbury, for release from the sentence of excommunication. The petition is in the Record Office, and I see Laud has written on it an instruction to the Dean of Arches to report to him before anything is done in the matter, for "he hath been a very troublesome man." Therein, I suspect, the Archbishop wrote Paul Powle's epitaph. I can hear little more of him. In 1638 he was living in his house at Felsham, in the full enjoyment of his old litigiousness and persistency; for we find that—recurring to that old grievance of seventeen years back—he brought an action for the return of some of the books left by Hindes in the Rectory of Great Waldingfield and since purchased for £24 by a clergyman named Bird who knew nothing of Powle's claim. What happened in the matter I do not know, probably nothing. Then in 1642 we hear of him as lending money, but as being at the same time, or a little later when repayment was due, in prison at Bury—it is not stated on what ground—and, again characteristically, because repayment was made a few days late, he insisted that the amount repaid should be considerably increased. Then in a subsequent Chancery deposition, in 1652, it is stated that Powle was dead, though the date of his death is not given, and in other Chancery pleadings, I am told, it is mentioned that he died in the Fleet prison in London. Whether, however, these imprisonments arose out of the old trouble with the Court of High Commission seems doubtful, for that Court had been abolished in 1641. Thus was his turbulent life gradually extinguished in obscurity and disgrace. He seems already to have lost his devoted wife, and his daughter Sarah, named after her mother, occupied her father's house at Felsham and held the presentation to the living of Great Waldingfield. The Felsham parish registers for that period no longer exist, there is no monument to Powle or his family in the Church, and I cannot anywhere find his will. That will was, doubtless, a document on which Powle spent some care as he had a larger estate to devise than any of his family before or after, but their wills are mostly extant and his has disappeared. He probably died about the beginning of the Civil War troubles, and in the general dislocation of these times his will and the memory of his end were both alike lost.

There is one fact which may indicate that Paul Powle was perhaps a more estimable person than the records present to us. He not only came of an estimable stock but his descendants also were sturdy and admirable men. His son, John Powle, for whom he had purchased the Great Waldingfield living, was of Puritan leanings, a great admirer of Owen, but though, as he said, he would rather any order in the Church than none, he was for episcopal rule; consequently, after having been parson of Great Waldingfield for a time (though there is no mention of him as rector in the Waldingfield registers or any other official document), he states in his will that he refused to sign the Covenant and fled, never to return, as he honourably refused to turn out the incumbent he placed there. He became vicar of Dartford—at a time when many travellers, Pepys frequently among them, stopped at this village to change horses and dine at the Bull, as in later years for the old vicar's sake I have done—and here spent a long life, for he was over eighty when he died in 1692, leaving little record of himself in the registers, but making a digressive and amusing will, which exhibits him as a staunch Protestant, and perhaps a rather eccentric personality. His hatred of Popery is pronounced; he lays many evils to its charge, including the great fire of London, and shows a knowledge of the history of various European countries, partly derived no doubt from his folio copy of Monro's History of the Wars of the King of Sweden, which he specially bequeathes to a nephew, and he desires that no Arminian be presented to the living of Great Waldingfield lest the souls of the people be infected with Pelagian principles which prepare for Popery. He would have no sermon preached at his funeral;* he will have no coffin because of the risk of being buried alive; and he directs that no stone or railing shall be placed to mark his grave. He married twice, having a family by each wife, and he divided among them a considerable property evidently derived from his father. One of his daughters married his successor at Dartford. In his son William this circle of clerical ancestors is completed.

[* He evidently felt strongly on this point, for he dwells on it at length: "I will that there be no sermon at my burial, funeral sermons in the general having done more harm than good as they have been commonly used, the original of the custom not commendable, the abuse of it very great, the consequences prejudicial and destructive, being eulogiums unto, and in the hearing of those who were not strangers to, the deceased, and who, finding those placed in Heaven by the Preacher whose conversation was so well known to them to be but civil at best, they hence take liberty to cast away care of any strict search into their spiritual estate...For these reasons let me be buried in silence without word spoken except the office appointed."]

William Powle left his fellowship at Pembroke College to accompany as curate the Master of the College, Dr. Coga, who had chosen to retire from Cambridge to the rich living of Framlingham. Here for many years Powle lived and laboured, the burden of the cure doubtless sliding more and more from the shoulders of the aged rector on to his; the entries in the register are largely in his hand. He married, acquired property in Framlingham, and here nearly all his children were born. In due course when his father's incumbent—"a very careless incumbent," it is recorded—at length died in 1694, William Powle migrated to Great Waldingfield. The Rectory, to-day entirely transformed, stands in spacious and pleasant grounds, approached through a winding avenue of trees from the Church. Here Powle lived, and in old age died, the finest flower of his race, and the model of an eighteenth-century parish priest, scholar and squire and pastor of souls, simple, just, modest and practical, loved and esteemed by all. His eldest son, who bore his father's name and was certainly intended to succeed to his father's living, had died immediately after taking his degree. This was evidently a severe blow to the old man, and in his will—an unaffected and straightforward document with none of the quaintly aggressive personal touches we find in his father's will—he directs that he is to be buried near to this son. He had other sons and was married to a third wife (widow of Mark Anthony, a rector of Framlingham), also affectionately mentioned in the will, but it is his daughter Susannah whom he makes his sole executrix with considerable powers and to whom he leaves the presentation to the living which is afterwards to be sold, and became, as it still remains, the property of Clare College. In the male line, after some four centuries of vigorous life, the Powles were now a declining stock; William Powle was the final emoresence of the family, and in his sons it died out. Alike in Kebles and Peppens and Powles the line of hereditary succession has finally been through the women.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the history of these families became rather featureless, on the whole, indeed, more humble. Powle Peppen, the only child of Richard Peppen and Susannah Powle, spent his whole life quietly at Edwardstone. He had not inherited the Powle property, which went to his Uncle John, nor, probably, had he inherited any aptitude for business, for the Peppens, as we know, were apt only for the Church, but he seems to have maintained his place in life. I know that he had to borrow money, but I know also that he duly repaid it in instalments for I hold the receipts. He had married Mary Dodd, of Cockfield in Suffolk, whose father, Merry Dodd, seems to have been in business there. He was somehow related, according to a tradition on both sides of my family, to that brilliant, extravagant, careless Rev. Dr. Dodd, who acquired some fame and much notoriety as an eloquent preacher, the skilful editor of the Beauties of Shakespeare which served to popularise Shakespeare, and a forger who—so great was the public outcry against the infliction of the penalty on such a person—proved to be the last in England to expiate the offence of forgery by hanging.*

[* The main facts about Dodd were brought together in a book by Percy Fitzgerald, A Famous Forgery, 1865. The author remarks that "no English social event of that character, before or since, ever excited so much absorbing interest."]

I have inherited a miniature said to represent Dr. Dodd, but what his relationship was to Mrs. Powle Peppen neither the genealogy of the Cockfield Dodds, so far as I possess it, nor the biography of the unfortunate divine suffices to make clear, and it could not have been closer, at nearest, than cousinship. A descendant of the Dodd family, with whom I have been in touch, had not heard of Mary Dodd. Mary Peppen died in 1767, two years before Dr. Dodd's execution at Tyburn, at the early age of twenty-seven, and left two little girls who, though I suppose that they spent their motherless youth with their widowed father (he never seems to have married again) in a small village without social position save a tradition of gentility, possessed fine personal qualities and may be said to have married well, one to my great grandfather. John Ellis, a burgess, like his father before him, of Sudbury, the other to my great-grandfather, Laver Oliver, burgess of Bury St. Edmunds, a most energetic and prosperous citizen of the town, where he was an upholsterer beside establishing an extensive carrier system, greatly furthering the fortune of a mainly commercial family which still flourishes honourably in Bury and Sudbury.*

[* In its ramifications the family has been active in many professional and other fields. One of its members, a retired Anglo-Indian, had an extensive genealogical tree prepared. This was once lent to me by the head of the Bury family.]

Ellis is an old Suffolk name, and though I have not traced the Ellises I am descended from further back than William Ellis who was a burgess of Sudbury in the first half of the eighteenth century, I am content to believe that they were the same family who were burgesses of Sudbury in the previous century (when they owned the Swan Inn, later described by Dickens as the Peacock and demolished in my time), and, indeed, appear prominently in the Corporation's records centuries earlier. A family tradition, it is true, reports that the Ellises were descended from an eighteenth-century Mayor of Wrexham, in North Wales, but as there were then no mayors of Wrexham, and the tradition in other respects seems inexact, I am inclined to doubt it.*

[* It must be admitted there are points that make the Wrexham tradition plausible. It is derived from my eldest uncle, who in youth was much with his grandfather, and it harmonises with some ascertainable facts. The Wrexham Ellises used the same Christian names; they were Congregationalists like those of Sudbury and helped to found a church of which in 1783 a Mr. Jenkin Lewis was minister, and it so happens that my father has informed me he had heard of a family connection with the Lewises, a name not belonging to Suffolk. But the original Sudbury Ellis, if he came from Wrexham, must have left long before this period. Palmer's History of Wrexham makes no mention of any Ellis who fulfils the necessary conditions. The settlement of the matter may doubtless be found in the registers of All Saints, Sudbury. Another tradition, also coming through the same uncle, is more intangible. According to this, the Ellises are really Wyatts, a Wyatt at some unstated period having been adopted by an Ellis. In 1743 there was at Sudbury a John Wyatt, apparently like the Ellises a dissenter in religion, but he was not early enough.]

I only know certainly that towards the middle of the eighteenth century the family was respectably settled in Sudbury, where, from 1731 on, the name duly appears in the Registers of Baptisms of the ancient Independent Chapel, with which at the same time the family of the painter Gainsborough, who was born at Sudbury in 1727, was also connected. In 1764 we hear that William Ellis, my great-greatgrandfather, had his "dwelling house with appurtenances," situated in the parish of All Saints, Sudbury, "set apart for the religious worship of Protestant Dissenters by certificate under the Archdeacon." (The house of John Gainsborough, clothier, in the parish of St. Peters, had been similarly set apart in 1756.) At that time William Ellis was described as a staymaker, which was also the occupation of Thomas Paine's father at Thetford almost at the same time; in 1792 he is described in the Universal British Directory, amongst the principal inhabitants of Sudbury, as a wool-factor. His son John, my great-grandfather, who married Elizabeth Peppen, became a linen-draper in the city of London in 1790, and is so termed on the certificate admitting him to the freedom of the Borough of Sudbury and to all the liberties and privileges appertaining. His private address was then in Astley Row, Islington.*

[* In 1929 I went to look at the house, once of highly respectable character, now falling into decay, but still facing a pleasant open space.]

My grandfather Edward was the second child, and the young wife took him as a baby on a visit to her husband's family at Sudbury. I have the fresh and charming letter she wrote to her husband on the occasion; full of delight at the admiration her child has aroused in the stage-coach, and with a trace of gay persiflage of all the old people at Sudbury and their meeting-house. John Ellis established a linen-draper's business in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden; his shop seems to have acquired a reputation in the theatrical region in which it was situated; Mrs. Siddons, the great actress, used to come to him for her stockings; an engraving of her—presented, I understand, by herself—has been handed down in the family. It would appear, however, that the business was not successful—only the Olivers among my forebears seem to have had any genuine relish for trade—and at a late date John Ellis became a corn-factor. As regards his personal tastes, I only know that he was fond of music and played the organ. My father could just recall him as a tall, dignified, and handsome old gentleman in knee-breeches who called him "Ned." One day in Chapel, a little later, after joining heartily in the singing, he sat down, stooped to pick up his gloves, and was shortly after found to be dead.

His son Edward, born in 1794, who spent his life as a warehouseman in the London Docks, occupied the spacious, well-built, and pleasant corner-house which still stands on the Pier Head at Wapping; it was later occupied by his eldest son and successor as an official in the Docks, my Uncle John, and in childhood I was often taken there. My father's father—as I gather from what I have heard of him and from his daguerreotype portrait—was thought French in appearance and, unlike his father, was of small size. (His mother referred to his "dark eyes" even as an infant, and I may perhaps conclude that he took after her and that the Peppens were a small dark race.) He was a gentle and sensitive man of rather nervous and anxious temperament, refined artistic tastes, and versatile intellectual aptitudes. His relations considered him rather indifferent to religion, but judging from a letter he wrote to my father when a boy, chatty and familiar but with a simply genuine reference to religious matters, I suspect that he was religious at heart. He was fond of flowers and of music, himself playing the flute. He dabbled in mechanical problems, and invented a new kind of buoy which was found by the authorities to be excellent in idea but impracticable, though afterwards it was modified by others and generally adopted. He liked to draw, and desired his sons to have a sound education in drawing, for which, however, they had little taste. He amused himself, too, by tinting prints of the old masters with delicate water-colour washes. He was also a good amateur carpenter, and made an excellent book-case which is still in use. He had little affinity with his commonplace wife, the daughter of a yeoman farmer, named Gxay, in the Isle of Wight, and he was rather worried by her ceaseless household activities on behalf of the family of seven children which filled the fine solid old house on the Pier Head.

On the whole the Ellis family seems to me chiefly remarkable for its mediocrity, a golden mediocrity it may possibly be, the mediocrity of people who have no vices and no temptations, who never absolutely fail in life, but have no great ambitions and no great ideals. Their energy is always fairly adequate to carry them along the path of life in which they find themselves, but they are never troubled by any surplus of unused energy. "In medio tutissimus ibis," that is a truth they know by instinct. My own temperament has in it elements of an extremely other sort, and I owe much to the Ellises fora good dose of this beautiful mediocrity, to me a harmonising influence of the most precious character.

Very different were the characteristics of my mother's family, I mean especially the Olivers, to whom my mother's mother belonged. Here there was an exuberant energy which displayed itself in various fields. They wandered over the world as soldiers, they achieved success in commerce and trade; they were, indeed, the only family from which I spring which showed any aptitude for making money. In recent times an Oliver, a cousin of my mother's, was regarded as the foremost citizen of Bury St. Edmunds, the town of the Olivers, though they had originally come from Sudbury, with which they retained a connection, so having moved in a reverse direction from the Powles who originated in Bury, to settle later around Sudbury, where Olivers and Powles both came in contact with Ellises who seem always to have belonged to Sudbury or the neighbourhood. That is how it came to pass that I am doubly descended from the Powles and the Peppens and the Kebles through the marriages of my two great grandmothers, Elizabeth Peppen to John Ellis and Susannah Peppen to Laver Oliver. Thus, so far as I can trace, I am purely English in the narrowest sense, and on both sides I am half of Suffolk descent. Of recent years—since I have become acquainted with these facts and since also I have learnt to know the characteristics of Suffolk—I have been amused to trace in myself some of the fundamental traits of the Suffolk character.*

[* That I am justified in regarding myself as mainly an East Anglian of Suffolk is indicated by at least one little organic trait. As a child I was worried by finding in myself a difficulty in pronouncing the "th," notably in such a combination as the biblical "it sufficeth us," and the difficulty still remains. It is only of recent years that I have learnt that this difficulty is a recognised East Anglian shibboleth.]

East Anglia, as I have found, has some claim to be a focus of English genius. Much that is most typical in English politics and adventure, thought and science and art practice, has come out of East Anglia. The people of Suffolk, sometimes apparently slow, are yet ever exuberant in energy, often bright of eye and quick of action. Cautious, patient, pliant, conciliatory, they can yet be forceful, independent, obstinate. Not superficially brilliant like the people of the south-west, they are not so impenetrably reserved beneath a hard rind like the people of the north; there is a strong emotional undercurrent which makes itself felt, even though it may not be visible, so that they are a friendly people whom it is not difficult to get on with. Women play a large part among them. The solidity these people of Suffolk owed to their Dutch and Flemish affinities has been modified by French Huguenot and other foreign elements. They are a practical and materialistic people who delight to make their surroundings spacious and beautiful, a religious and benevolent people, indeed, yet by no means ascetic, scarcely even, in the narrow sense, a severely moral people; their instincts in life, as in science and art, tend to direct them towards Nature.

At many of these points I feel myself to be a true child of Suffolk. I have sometimes been puzzled at my instinctive and seemingly opposed attraction towards science and towards art. But they are both in the Suffolk character and both alike are forms of the love of Nature. The fact, however, that I am a true child of Suffolk is brought home to me by the instinctive attraction which I have often felt towards people who came from the same district as I come from, even before I knew what that district was. As a student, the two fellow-students for whom I felt a touch of real personal affection—though from lack of common intellectual interests no permanent friendship was formed—both came, as I afterwards discovered, from the same parts of Suffolk as my own family, while the only fellow-student with whom I have formed a lifelong friendship, Dr. Barker Smith, belonged on both sides to the neighbourhood of Castle Hedingham, within a walk of Sudbury where my own ancestral roots are most deeply planted. Almost the most intimate of my women friends during many years belonged to the same region, and even a girl patient in the hospital, who was once under my care as a student, and seemed so charming to me that I wrote a sonnet about her (Arabella), possibly belonged, as I now judge by her type and her name, to Suffolk.

When I consider the character and ability of these various Suffolk forefathers so far as known to me, I seem to trace elements of my own character—of individuality, of persistence, of obstinate fidelity to one's own ideas—in several of the remote country parsons from whom I am doubly descended. William Powle may be said to be the most distinguished figure of my family of whose character very definite record is left. The filial piety of his daughter and the generous and grateful appreciation of his son-in-law, Richard Peppen, perpetuated his memory. They also showed their affectionate piety towards the old man's memory by naming their only child Powle. The Latin epitaph on William Powle's altar-tomb is a precise characterisation which can scarcely be classed with the vague and flowery eulogies so common in such places. I translate as follows: "Here by his own desire are laid the mortal remains of William Powle, A.M., for thirty-three years the most vigilant Rector of this church, a man wise, modest, and learned, simple and without guile, pious without pretence, a theologian to be numbered among the first both for skill in judgment and for power of discourse. He died on the 14th of September in the year of human salvation 1727, aged seventy-two." I cannot pretend to myself that I am in any field all that is here attributed to this accomplished ancestor who died exactly a century before my father was born. But that impulse which led me as a child to play at being a preacher in church, later to propose, as the only vocation that had any attraction at all for me, to enter the Church, and has ever since made me a preacher in other fields, may well be rooted, since it displayed itself so spontaneously, in a inherited aptitude already displayed in a large number of ancestors from whom I am doubly descended and, it would seem, with especial completeness in. William Powle, who seems to have possessed also the reasonableness of character, the judicial temperament, which some have noted as traits of mine. The Peppens were distinguished by their piety towards the past and their obstinacy in going their own way in the present. Both these characteristics are certainly pronounced in me, and I have sometimes wondered whether that un-English (once, at least, Flemish) air which both English and foreign acquaintances have noted in me may not be the atavistic reminiscence of Walloon Pepins from whom the Peppens of Wenhaston must assuredly have descended. The Peppens combined their independent character and their ecclesiasticism with a certain eye to the main chance, not only in the branch I belong to but in the related and also clerical branches; thus one of these clergymen married a baronet's daughter and assumed a crest, a Pegasus, and what connection he found between Peppens and Pegasus I have sometimes wondered. William Keble combined the Peppens' obstinacy and devotion to principle with an indifference to consequences which arouses my admiration, although I scarcely share his spirit of exclusive partisanship; I specially admire the spirit in which the old man, once driven forth from his living for his staunch opposition to Puritanism, left a will so free from bitterness, and was chiefly concerned that his trees should not be cut down.

Herewith I have presented the salient features of my remote Suffolk ancestry: for the most part a distant crowd of scholars and parsons, in recent times almost hidden from sight by men of the sea.

The Olivers stand apart among these Suffolk families, the most recent and the most apt for worldly success. If, however, they knew how to make money, some of them knew how to waste it. They were often, it seems, self-willed, reckless people, intolerant of restraint. They sometimes met tragic ends; I vaguely recall hearing of one, an officer in the army, who narrowly escaped being buried alive on the West coast of Africa by the happy thought of someone who before the burial rubbed him with cayenne pepper, but who was shortly after blown up in an explosion at a fort in Jamaica. They were high-spirited, perhaps a little insolent as well as reckless. An Oliver, a young officer, once waited on Lord Cornwallis, himself a Suffolk man, and then Commander-in-Chief, to beg his favour in obtaining a commission. "You look as if you had come to confer a favour rather than ask for it," Cornwallis observed. Physically they tended to be large, imposing, portly people, not handsome—with a mouth too long in upper lip—but with deliberate vigour, with the air of grave responsibility which sometimes marks the man of large and imperious physical organism. It is a variety of the John Bull type. In their portraits they stand with figures well drawn up and seeming to demand a certain amount of space around them, by no means inviting approach. There is a certain anxiety in their countenances, a certain physiological discomfort, the expression of a massive restless organism, too conscious of itself, which cannot but assert: I am I, in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius's words: "As though the emerald should say: Whatever happens I must be emerald," words I have so often found myself murmuring through life, by no means necessarily in the spirit of one who would preserve some immaculate purity, but in the conviction that one's own peculiar instincts, good or bad, cannot be violated. I recall my mother's only surviving uncle who was completely of this type. He lived in Chelsea, having occupied an official position at the Chelsea Hospital. He had formed a relationship with his housekeeper, whom he never married but openly had two sons by her. My mother, inflexible as were her own moral standards, seems to have accepted this situation, and I never heard her criticise it. I remember her taking me to Chelsea, and I remember Uncle Oliver visiting us with his older son.

My grandmother, Susannah Oliver (afterwards Wheatley), was born in 1788, the eldest child and only girl in a large family of brothers who idolised her. In a miniature and two pencil portraits she appears a woman of energy and intelligence and vivacity, with a touch of melancholy in the eyes, but a witty and sensitive curve of the lips, not formally beautiful but with the attraction that comes of vitality and spirit. Her chief beauty was considered to be her long and abundant hair, worn in clustered curls at the front and a large mass on the top of the head, of auburn colour in the miniature, but a soft mousy brown in the bracelet made of it which I now possess. (The women of the Oliver family of to-day, I am told, are still noted for their beautiful hair.) She was a capable woman, and had a high-class school for girls she had set up in a large old house at Leyton, then a rural suburb of London. I cannot easily imagine her at the head of the prim academy for young ladies we hear of as typical of these days, but I am not surprised at her success. I recall the great gateway and the avenue of trees leading to Suffolk House, as it was called, where my mother once took me as a child to see her birthplace; it was pulled down a few years ago to give place to rows of workmen's houses, but it still figures with other large old vanished houses in the local Histories. Susannah Oliver was a woman of culture and accomplishments. She painted flowers in the delicate and commonplace Dutch manner of her day; she played the harp, on which occasions her beautiful arms aroused much admiration. Her tastes in literature especially were fine and wide, ranging over many fields, scientific and artistic; she seems to have bought the best literature of her day, and many of the books that fed or aroused my own early thirst for knowledge had her bookplate in them. Of these I note especially Rowlandson's Doctor Syntax, on which I pored with concentrated interest, Rousseau's Reveries, the first French book I ever read out of school for my own pleasure, Maria Edgeworth's Harry and Lucy, a cleverly written popularisation of science in story form which I still vividly recall, and Nature Displayed, a more technical, well illustrated but too concise summary of scientific knowledge in numerous volumes, not excluding human anatomy. I know it was too concise, for there, at the age of twelve, I sought to satisfy my nascent curiosity concerning the sexual organs of woman, but intently as I studied the brief account given I was baffled, for I could not understand how a region which, so far as I knew anything of it, was so bare could yet harbour so many different objects with definite Latin names. My grandmother was a friend of Miss Sarah Stickney, afterwards the wife of William Ellis, the missionary whose books on Polynesia are still an ethnological treasure-house, and herself one of the most influential writers of the time. I doubt, however, if she could have influenced my grandmother, for she was eleven years her junior and had scarcely began to publish when my grandmother died. The Stickneys were a Yorkshire Quaker family, but had relatives in Suffolk, which doubtless accounts for my grandmother's association with Sarah. Her mother, Esther Stickney, described in her daughter's biography as "a refined and intellectual woman," died when Susannah Wheatley was a girl of thirteen, but a miniature, said to be of Mrs. Stickney, has descended to me, an attractive, good-looking, mature woman, with calm, observant, self-possessed eye, and softly rounded full chin. The Stickneys were Quakers of the best type. My grandmother was anything but a Quaker; she was something of a woman of fashion; she wore coal-scuttle bonnets of the largest size, whence once an embarrassing difficulty in entering a carriage; and on the eve of her wedding-day, being obliged to have her hair dressed by the hairdresser the day before, she sat up all night; she impressed her neighbours by appearing at church every Sunday with a new pair of gloves, and it was known that she tight-laced by fastening the laces to the bed-post; this, indeed, it was said, conduced to her death in child-bed on the birth of her third child at the age of a little over forty. This child died young, and another, a boy, went to sea in a ship that was never again heard of, so that my mother was the only surviving child.

Susannah Oliver had married her sailor husband, John Wheatley, late in life; it is perhaps characteristic of her impulsive and dominating Oliver temperament that when, after the marriage, the moment came for Captain Wheatley to go back to his ship she found it impossible to let him go; he abandoned the voyage, and indeed gave up the sea altogether for a. life of dignified indolence; henceforth, instead of his ship's poop, he paced up and down the garden walks at Leyton—as my father's brother, who sometimes went to see him there when a boy, has described to me—in the leisurely and stately manner natural to the fair, handsome, imposing man whom I only know by his miniature, a very large man, my uncle said, who spoke but little but, when he spoke, spoke well. He was overwhelmed by grief at his wife's death, which caused indeed an attack of brain fever; he could not bear to look at anything that had belonged to her, and rapidly disposed of jewels and much else that should have come later to my mother. But he lived on for more than twenty years, marrying again a lively little widow with a large family, named Parr, whom he had engaged to keep on the school.

I know little else of my maternal grandfather, who was born in 1783 and died in 1853, six years before I was born. He had traded chiefly in the Mediterranean, especially to Smyrna, whence he had brought the stuff for his wife's wedding gown. Early in life he had been taken prisoner during the French wars, and when I was a child my mother would tell me how as a prisoner in France he was given black bread which when thrown against the wall would stick to it, and how he had at last escaped through the good offices of a French girl, a certain Annette, possibly—though of that my mother never hinted, and perhaps never knew—the sweetheart of the fair and handsome Englishman. I would gladly have known the story of that episode. (For his grandson also owes very much to a French girl.) Doubtless it was due to his imprisonment in France, and in part perhaps to Annette, that my grandfather wrote an easy and fluent though incorrect French; he would write letters in French to my mother as a schoolgirl—I possess some of them—and playfully sign himself "Jean Houtclet." The Wheatleys generally, as I know them, were a race of large and placid people, imposing to look at in their natural and unostentatious dignity, but, unlike the Olivers, of no great energy intellectual or practical. They had long been settled in Durham and Sunderland. A John de Wheatley figures in the roll of the famous Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, in 1337, and John was the favourite Christian name of the family, whose surname appears from time to time until a John Wheatley from whom I can definitely trace descent came to light in the seventeenth century and was succeeded by another of the same name who married a Haswell, a prominent landed family of those parts. Their son was my great-grandfather Ralph Wheatley, who about 1776 married Mary Havelock at Sunderland Parish Church; the marriage, tradition says, was that of the handsomest couple of their time in the town.

Sunderland was a great shipping centre, during the French wars the chief ship-building place in the Kingdom, so that many fortunes were made there. The Wheatleys were, above all, sailors (at least two were drowned), merchants, sea-captains or naval officers, shipbuilders, sailmakers. Ralph Wheatley became prosperous and rich, leaving considerable property and a large family, of which my grandfather was the youngest, and owing to that fact, and his absence at sea, he seems to have received but a small share of the paternal fortune. The only story that has come down to me of that prosperous household (unless indeed it refers to an earlier generation) has its point in the dignity especially associated with the Wheatley family. It concerns a daughter of the house who, suffering from flatulence, prepared herself a glass of hot spirits and water, and laying strict injunctions on the housemaid to admit no one into the drawing-room, there proceeded to pin up her skirts round her waist (no drawers were worn in these days) and leisurely drink her spirits, standing with her back to the fire; while thus engaged a carriage drove up and the negligent housemaid or some other servant ushered in one of the most eminently conventional and respectable families in the neighbourhood. This story may illustrate the customs of the time rather than the traits of an individual young lady, for there is a charming picture extant by Isaac Cruikshank presenting a young lady in the same attitude. I may remark that in some later collateral branches of the Wheatley family slight eccentricity was manifested. Ralph Wheatley's eldest son, another Ralph, who became a sailmaker at, I think, Greenwich, was said to be a man of unusual character, and of one of his daughters, who was nicknamed "Sally Brass," many pranks were narrated. Another cousin of my mother's may possibly have been subject to these fugues which have of recent years been studied as epileptic manifestations, for from time to time he would mysteriously leave his wife and family and disappear. But though there were many Wheatleys, for they tended to have large families, there was no definite insanity. Except, indeed, that an Oliver once became insane in old age, I cannot find traces of insanity, scarcely of any gross nervous disease or pronounced mental abnormality in any of the families from which I spring and am thus suspicious of the statement, so often made, that there is insanity in every family. It seems to me by no means so evenly distributed, and that while there is a great deal of insanity in some families, there is very little in others.

Ralph Wheatley, my great-grandfather, as I have mentioned, married Mary Havelock. She was the aunt of the famous General Havelock, who was thus my grandfather's first cousin. At this time the Havelocks were also gaining prosperity as shipbuilders at Sunderland, where the future general was born nineteen years later. The Havelocks had long been scattered about this region, but the chief centre of the family seems to have been Grimsby, and on the seal of the Grimsby Corporation, beside Grime, the supposed founder of the town, is seen the figure of a crowned youth Havlock, said in the legendary Lay of Havlok the Dane to have been the lost child of a great sea-king who, having been saved by fishermen, became a cook-boy at Lincoln but, being recognised as the stoutest man in England, married the young English princess Goldeburgh, reigned for sixty years, and left fifteen sons and daughters, who all became kings and queens. It appears that the boundary stone outside Grimsby is still called the Havelock Stone. According to later tradition the Havelock family descended from Guthrum, the really historical Danish King of East Anglia in the days of Alfred the Great, who converted him to Christianity. It is likely that this tradition was in the mind of my mother's favourite cousin, Nancy Wheatley, who told me in childhood that the Wheatleys were descended from the Danish Kings of England. My mother gave me at birth the name of General Havelock, not because of the relationship but because of her admiration for him as a hero who, above all soldiers of the time, had the reputation of being a devout Christian. I am not sure that I have a concrete mental representation of Sir Henry Havelock, who was not only a devout Christian but a stern and capable general of the type of Cromwell's Ironsides, with no objection to blow men from guns, nor am I prepared to say that I have the slightest resemblance to him. The only link I can find is that he was nicknamed by his schoolfellows the Philosopher, which happens to be the name which my wife has often playfully applied to me, and possibly a certain firm moral tenacity which I certainly inherit from my mother. (And I have been amused to note in Havelock's portraits a very prominent chin dimple equally marked in me.) Havelock is the chief representative in my family of the fighting element which played a considerable part on my mother's side of the house, both the Wheatleys and the Olivers, several of her uncles having been colonels and naval officers, one of them with Nelson at Copenhagen. But none seems to have been in the direct line of my descent.

One of my four grand-parental families I have still left undescribed. It stands rather apart. I have found difficulties in defining its characteristics and in formulating my own spiritual relation to it, so that I was unable to feel much interest in this family, with which indeed I have never come in contact and never heard much about. I refer to the family of my father's mother, the Grays of the Isle of Wight. My grandmother, whom I can barely remember, was an excellent woman of colourless character whose life was completely absorbed by domestic routine, and whose energies, I imagine, would in no case have been conspicuous in any other sphere. But she was the daughter—the sixteenth and youngest child—of a really notable and superior woman, Sarah Gray, the only person among my direct ancestors, so far as I know, of whom anyone has ever thought it worth while to write and publish a biography.*

[* Memoirs of Mrs. Sarah Gray, late of the Isle of Wight. Written by her granddaughter Eliza Morris. Hammersmith, 1831, pp. 62. Price one shilling.]

The Grays were yeomen farmers long established, I believe, at little Fields Farm near Carisbrooke, where, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, they were represented by Richard Gray, my great-grandfather. In a neighbouring parish, his future wife Sarah, the daughter of another farmer (the biographer strangely neglects to mention either her maiden name or the name of the parish), was born in 1759 at Quarry Farm. It is on the religious character of this lady that her biographer chiefly insists, and too much else is omitted, so that I can but echo the remark which Eliza Morris herself puts into the reader's mouth: "The one half was not told me."

Sarah was brought up as a member of the Church of England and duly confirmed at the age of fifteen. But religion in those days was a disturbing and even exciting element of life. The clergyman, we are told, was "a man of very immoral habits," and so was incapable of preaching the way of salvation, but he had evidently attracted the enthusiastic devotion of his flock to the Church, for when a preacher—no doubt, though we are not told so, one of the new sect of Methodists—arrived in "the now highly favoured but then destitute Island," and endeavoured to preach in her parish, Sarah was desirous to hear him, but was "prevented by the noise and tumult of the people," who evinced the malice and enmity of their hearts against everything that was spiritual by pelting the minister with stones and rotten eggs, and drowning the sound of his voice by beating drums and kettles, so that he could not proceed in his discourse, but turning himself to the scoffing crowd, said with a firm voice: "I shake off the dust from my feet as a testimony against you, and verily it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the days of Judgement than for you, but I am absolved from the guilt of your destruction." The young girl wept much at the awful sentence thus pronounced by one who evidently possessed the Keys of Hell, and not long after her marriage in 1775 she "cast in her lot with the people of God," being therein followed by her husband. "Being greatly blessed in their temporal circumstances," in course of time, with the aid of a few friends, they built a chapel at Node Hill, which seems, however, to have been some miles away from their house. Mrs. Gray brought up sixteen children, not all of whom, we are told, showed her religious faith, but they were a family of fine and robust farmers, and my grandmother, who was the youngest, was also the smallest. Mrs. Gray was something of a saint, but in the practical English way. Her minister was the Rev. D. Tyerman, a remarkable man whose name and work survive; he was sent out on a prolonged tour of missionary inspection in the South Seas and died in Madagascar. Sarah Gray seems to have accepted the doctrine of her Bible and the Calvinistic principles of her sect, but she understood them in her own personal way, and by the instincts of her own beautiful nature she developed into a kind of mystic.

"In secret silence of the mind

My Heaven and there my God I find,"

were lines she loved to repeat, and they are of the essence of mysticism. "She was arrived at the highest state of Christian perfection," we are told, but she necessarily lived a busy, practical life in which every moment was occupied, an industrious, economical and prudent housewife. "Her maxim was always to be doing something for this world or the next," and "never to her recollection did she lie in bed after the sun had risen." But while thus labouring indefatigably in the details of domestic life on a farm her outlook was large. She was not one of the trivially fussy domesticated women. She possessed the gift of love. She never sought to find fault with others and she practised religion rather than talked about it; she was very liberal to the poor, though generally in secret, and "never did she oppress the hireling in his wages," but was always the friend of her servants. It was the love of God that made the core of her religion. Upon that she would dwell with ever new delight, and often repeat "God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." She also loved Nature, and all the more during the last twelve years of her life when, confined to her bed but unable to lie down—no doubt affected by cardiac disease—she loved to have her curtains open during her restless nights so that she might gaze on the sky. She died in 1830 at the age of seventy. Her husband, who died many years earlier, was the meet companion of this woman with a genius for religion, so full of sweetness and loving-kindness. "The pilgrims of olden time used to give Mr. Gray the honourable appellation of the hospitable Gaius," and he always read, we are told, a fragment of the Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible every evening after the day's business was over. He was a well-to-do man and left £1000 apiece to his very large family. Several of his children emigrated to America, others were scattered about England (though I have never been in touch with any of their families), and I suppose it was in this way that Sophia met Edward Ellis. They were married at Hackney—the then quiet and dignified London suburb where old John Ellis retired and died (as also later, it so chanced, my mother's father), about the year 1821, and became the parents of six children, four boys and two girls, of whom my father, the fourth, was, I believe, born at Bromley.

Of late I have meditated on the significance that the Grays may have in my own ancestral inheritance. An intuitive woman, by no means a mystic herself, remarked to me the other day that she thought that if I had been less scientific I should have been a mystic. It is not a fact that I have ever wished to obtrude, yet it is a fact that there is no need for me to wait to be less "scientific," for I am a natural mystic already by inborn constitution as well as by actual experience. The religion of my numerous clerical ancestors, however admirable and genuine, approved indeed by persecution, was not, so far as can now be discerned, mystical; it was in the best sense ecclesiastical. My mother again, whose evangelical piety was so genuine and so practical, so completely the ruling power of her life, was not a mystic. In this matter I see in myself a faint reflection of that inner light, so spontaneously kindled in the beautiful soul of my great-grandmother, Sarah Gray.

The general distinctive fact about the Grays, however, was that they were farmers or yeomen; Sarah Gray was herself a farmer's daughter. In that respect the Grays were unlike the other families from which I am descended. The Ellises, the Olivers, the Wheatleys had not cultivated the soil for some two centuries, perhaps longer. Putting aside trade and other miscellaneous occupations, the prevailing vocation of my forefathers on both sides was the sea, and behind that the Church. The sea has not played a large part in the ancestry of the people who represent England to the world, large as has been the part it has played in the life of England and the English people. In the whole of British genius, in my study of that subject, I have estimated the maritime ancestry as 1.9 less than any other class, and few representative English people proceeded from this ancestry, unless it may be Byron, William Penn, Bishop Andrewes, and Stamford Raffles. In recent days I think of Edward Carpenter as belonging to a naval family, but of no others. My own complicated and far-spread maritime ancestry thus seems to me rare indeed in the English spiritual field. To it I am inclined to attribute a large part of what is in me characteristic. I seem to myself peculiarly English, yet I have to acknowledge that I am singularly unlike many other peculiarly English persons. That seems to me due to the fact that I am English of the sea and they are English of the land. That fluid, libertarian, adventurous, versatile spirit I find in myself, the far sight, the wide outlook, is English of the sea, the characteristic outcome of the sailor's life. I miss the note of earthiness, so common in the English mind and in the English style. It is not present in me even when I am sensuous, even in the touch of the satyr or the faun my friends are sometimes pleased, quite rightly no doubt, to find in me, for it is not possible to one whose spirit is washed by the salt sea. I am born of the water and the wind, precisely the elements that raged furiously on the night I entered the world. The more typical kind of Englishman is born of the earth, his eyes have been fixed on its furrows, and not on the horizon; he deals with a hard and rebellious element not to be conquered mainly by skill, by adjustment, by reliance on Nature, but mainly by force, by muscular toughness, by pertinacity, by stubbornness. There is all that energy and tenacity in the typical Englishman, derived from his struggle with the earth and something of the mud of the earth usually remains bespattering his spirit. No doubt these qualities have come to me, too, especially much obstinate tenacity, for men far back in my ancestry tilled the soil; but they have had time to be transformed and sublimated. The Grays alone represent—and even then at a distance of three generations—a more recent infusion of the farmer's temperament, an infusion doubtless useful to qualify the rest.

Of even many details in my disposition it seems to me that the sea is the ultimate basis. Mountains, which are most remote from the sea, are antipathetic to me; the sea-like plains of Holland (made by the sea if one thinks of it) satisfy me more than the Andes and the Alps. I enjoy heights but it is because of their outlook and space and atmosphere:

"all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be,"

are words I have always loved of Shelley, who was in youth my poet of predilection, and Shelley—I know not why—is not the poet of earth so much as of sea and air. My love of purity—to be sure, in no prim and prudish sense—is an attraction to a quality which is of the sea rather than of the gross and muddy earth, and the quality of clinging tenacity towards all that I have ever loved is only a form of that fidelity which Conrad declared to be the chief virtue of the sailor.

On the whole, it may be seen, I represent on both sides the outcome, in the main, of families of sailors and people connected with the sea, while farther back, through both sides, is a long line of parish priests, solid, scholarly, admirable men, tenacious of their convictions, ready to suffer cheerfully for their devotion to those convictions. In my blood the two latent streams of tendency have entered into active combination and grown conscious at last in my brain. So I have become an adventurer in morals and a pioneer over spiritual seas.

In past years I have often puzzled over my own temperament and wondered whether I am of weaker or stronger character than average people. To-day I am no longer puzzled by the contradictory elements in myself. I see that they are simply the sum of the tendencies I have inherited from various families. At the core, doubtless, is the rather dominating, emotional and instinctive energy of the Olivers—for I have always felt that I derive the active side mainly from my mother, but that has been tempered by the indolent placidity—not without its underlying obstinacy, no doubt—of the Wheatleys and considerably modified by the easy-going nonchalance of the Ellises with the latent mysticism beneath it of the Grays. I detect in myself a tenacious and unyielding fidelity to the end or object or person that has once touched me deeply enough to affect my emotions and instincts, but on the surface I yield at a touch, and while I am prepared to suffer anything for the personal and impersonal ends that have really fascinated me, I am yet too lazy to move an inch out of my way for other ends that yet seem to me wholly worthy. I am not incapable, even, of a considerable dash of scepticism concerning the ends for which I can never cease to labour. But any question of weakness or strength becomes meaningless to me when I realise that these various tendencies are simply the balanced play within me of the Oliver strain, Wheatley strain, Ellis strain, Gray strain. I can understand what Renan says of the places occupied in his own temperament by unlike strains of Gascon and Breton.

I have said that, so far as mental aptitudes and tastes are concerned, I trace my inheritance especially to my father's father and my mother's mother, more remotely to the Suffolk rectors who were my ancestors along both lines. The creative and productive impulse was only latent in both of those grandparents but they had the intellectual and artistic temperament, a temperament which my father and my mother transmitted to me but themselves showed no trace of. My father, Edward Peppen Ellis, possessed all the mediocrity of his family, though in him it was revealed in an almost golden form. As a child he was described, in the terms of an old-fashioned mixed metaphor, as "the flower of the flock" in the large family, and going to sea early, passing half a century in a sailor's life, he developed a more open-air and genial personality than his brothers—who all spent their lives in the Docks like their father before them—and became the typical English sea-captain of whom Sir William Butler remarks in his Autobiography that he is the very best man that England produces. He never knew what a headache was like; his teeth were perfect until old age; he was never troubled by his digestion; no serious illness or physical disability ever befell him. Neither tobacco nor alcohol had any attraction for him, though on occasion he would accept a cigar or a cigarette and appreciated an occasional sherry and bitters until old age when he regularly took a little whisky. He was equally cheerful and sociable—always a great favourite with girls—content with what the days brought forth, never seeking to go beyond the surface of the things presented to him, though much contact with many kinds of people had imparted to him a touch of good-humoured scepticism. I doubt if he had ever read any poet but Pope, and while not uninterested in the natural things which fell directly beneath his notice, the manifold spectacle of life which he had seen under many aspects in many parts of the world had left him almost untouched. He was not shrewd or worldly or businesslike, outside his profession; he had availed himself little of his opportunities to make money and his investments were mostly unfortunate. After he retired from the sea, with a small pension from Trinity House, losing at almost the same time his iwo chief solaces, his ship and his wife, his life was for some years rather unsettled and troubled, but the Ellis spirit and his own temperament were finally reasserted. He went to live in a boarding-house by the sea belonging to a niece, leading an innocently gay and frivolous life, surrounded by young girls, an Epicurean whose philosophy was unconscious. When well past seventy he became attached to a lady, some thirty years his junior, and their marriage was only prevented at the last moment by the objection of the lady's relatives. But the couple remained affectionate friends; he went to live in her house at Folkestone as a lodger, and here he spent the remaining years of his life peacefully and happy, surrounded by her devoted care, and seeing his children from time to time. Once he went with her to Paris, for he had never been there and he felt it was an experience not to be missed. Frequently they would go up for a few days to London, where he was indefatigable in sight-seeing, an eager visitor to theatres and music-halls. His health remained unimpaired until the age of eighty-seven. Then, shortly after the Great War broke out, he passed through a phase of unwonted irritability of mood, and when that disappeared it was found that he was suffering from cancer of the liver. The final illness lasted only a few weeks and his mind remained clear, fully conscious that the end was approaching, but cheerful and even humorous. He never complained, and before the last restless stages of discomfort he would say that he felt ashamed of lying so comfortably in bed when there was so much suffering in the trenches. He would speak to me of all the little arrangements to be made after his death and was content and willing to go, having, as he put it, "had a good innings." Of religion or faith or hope of a future life there was never a word. He had never been either religious or irreligious, having never felt any inner need to be either, for he had never had any violent passions to restrain or any exalted aspirations to pacify. He had simply accepted, quietly and humbly, the religious conventions around him, joining without question in all the devotions of my mother, for whom he had the highest reverence. At sea he had conducted religious services whenever he felt it his duty to do so, just as under the like circumstances he had once or twice conducted a midwifery case, for on board his ship in the absence of the accredited representatives of those professions, the captain is both priest and doctor. In his last years, as I learnt from what he once told me, he had quietly and spontaneously become definitely sceptical in matters of religion, but he was not sufficiently interested in these matters to obtrude his conclusions on those whom they might hurt, and to please the devoted friend with whom he lived he cheerfully agreed to a visit from the parson. On the last day I saw him he had just received the Sacrament and even in a genuinely devout spirit. He was, however, as he certainly felt, in no personal need of the ministrations of the clergy or the erncacy of the ecclesiastical rites, for throughout life the Peace of God had been his by nature. More than once during these last days he said that at night, when lying awake in the dark, he seemed to see his ship waiting for him to board her. So, at length, he finally set sail. The Ellises, it may be seen, have no vices, but they buy that exemption at a price, for one is inclined to ask whether, when the right path is so easy to them, they really have any virtues. Their strength lies in their imperturbable mediocrity. This, it seems to me, at all events as here manifested, is a distinctively urban quality. The Ellises, in their various branches, have lived and survived through four or five generations in the heart of London. To do this successfully needs exactly the temperament of the Ellises, an indifference alike to the destroying ambitions and the destroying excesses which ravage the souls and bodies of these city-dwellers to whom the city is new. The Ellises still retain the same qualities. Among my numerous cousins and their children the girls are pretty and lovely, the boys, whatever their occupation, have all the qualities of trustworthy bank clerks, They neither rise nor fall.

I owe much to the mediocrity of the Ellises. It is true that, so far from being cheerfully content with the surface of things, I am a restless researcher below surfaces. I never live in the present—my moments of happiness have all been in the past or the future. But yet there has always been the precious modifying influence of that Ellis temperament. The disposition that finds its expression mainly in literary channels is usually tempted to adopt a view of life that is one-sided, excessive, or eccentric. If I have been able on the whole to maintain a wide and sunny view of life, not merely to escape the greed of wealth or of honour, but to temper the ardour of my faith and enthusiasm by a pervading reasonableness—a scepticism which smiles at all my failures—I think I owe it largely to that temperate and cheerful acceptance of the world which is part of the mediocrity of the Ellises. My life would have been happier had I possessed more of it.

On that foundation, however, only rather negative qualities can spring up. I have never doubted that I owe my more positive and fundamental qualities to my mother. Intellectually, indeed, my mother was not more distinguished than my father; but by her character, by her instinctive and emotional qualities, she was of an order much more rare and high.

In her early years my mother was a large, restless, active, high-spirited girl; her aunt called her "volatile," and her brother nicknamed her "the fish" because her activities led to her drinking much water. (She was, like me, born early in February under the sign of Aquarius.) So that there was clearly more in her of the energy of the Olivers than of the placidity of the Wheatleys, but a quiet massive energy with no restlessness in it after she reached adult age. She grew up, however, untamed, at Suffolk House, Leyton, in the large garden and orchard that throughout life remained with her a memory of delight, and is now swept away, covered by the eruption of mean streets from London. But at the age of seventeen an event occurred which affected her whole life, and in a way which I have sometimes thought was disastrous. She was "converted." No doubt that process of emotional expansion and sublimation was inevitable for one of her temperament; it was so even for me. But with her, as not with me, the acquirement of emotional serenity and joy was combined with adherence to a narrow and rigid creed. Henceforward she was a strict follower of "Evangelical" principles and practices. As current in her time, the Evangelical creed was simple; beyond ordinary religious observance, it meant a firm reliance on the Bible with an avoidance of all "worldliness."

Capt. Edward Peppen Ellis

Susannah Wheatley Ellis

[HAVELOCK ELLIS'S PARENTS, 1885]

To my mother it was almost a kind of Quakerism without the Quakers' eccentricities. She was naturally too tolerant and liberal-minded to cherish fads and extravagances of thought or action. Thus it was only in later years that she gave up her glass of sherry or ale from a conviction of the evils of drink, and though she never went to a theatre after the age of seventeen, she used no pressure to prevent her children from following their own inclinations in this and similar matters. But she had inevitably cut herself off from the influences which might have made for a larger development of her rich nature; soon after her conversion she refused the attractive invitation of a rich aunt who wished to take her on a visit to Paris; she would rather not go to so wicked a city; for she always consistently acted by the light of her principles. Essentially a Suffolk or at all events East Anglian woman—a type in which vitality and character and fine emotional impulse are sometimes happily combined—her full development was arrested. The "volatility" of the young girl never found its natural matured expression in the woman's life. Grave though with no formal solemnity, reserved if not exactly repressed, shy and nervous beneath the imposing presence she had inherited from both her parents, she was yet a woman of unmistakable force of character. Though she sought few friends, I doubt if she ever lost any, and their devotion to her was deep. Her force was unconscious and instinctive, perhaps all the more effective on that account. This was clearly illustrated by her relations with her husband. The affection on both sides was complete. She sincerely cherished all the conventional views of wifely devotion and marital authority. Yet when my father returned from his long sea-voyages she instinctively remained the mistress of the house and he instinctively fell into the position of a guest. However bravely he might whistle and loudly call for his boots, it was not with the easy assurance of mastership he shouted his orders on deck or damned the steward below. He felt rightly enough—for she was an excellent manager and organiser, equable in temper, always firm but always kind—that at home she was the captain. Possibly that may be why I have always been conscious of an element of weakness in him. I know that he was able to live up to the sailor's fidelity to duty and I never heard that he was guilty of any act of weakness in other relations of life. If, however, he came safely through, I am assured it was by the happily balanced temperament of the Ellises and not by virtue of strong character or high principle. But my mother, I always knew, was a tower of strength. Throughout life I have possessed an instinctive and unreasoned faith in women, a natural and easy acceptance of the belief that they are entitled to play a large part in many fields of activity. The spectacle of my mother's great and unconscious power—resting on the fact that the same emergence of capable womanhood occurred among my ancestors and perhaps, indeed, charactetised the region they belonged to, since Suffolk has produced so notable a proportion of English women of ability—certainly counted for much in that faith and that belief.

Although my mother could never have been beautiful—probably less so when young than in the dignity and repose of mature life—she had numerous suitors, certainly by no means drawn merely because she was a ward in Chancery with a small portion of £2,000 (coming from the Olivers) settled upon her, but by her really attractive qualities of impulsive energy combined with solidity of character. "Never marry a sailor," her father used to say to her. A few years after his death, she followed, nevertheless, lier mother's example. A sailor alone of her wooers won her hand and she married my father, who had just become captain of his first ship at the age of twentyeight, while she was two years younger. It was probably the only serious act of disobedience to her father she ever committed, but she certainly never repented. If in later years, as I am inclined to think, she realised with some sadness that her husband was not altogether the ideal she had once dreamed, that happens to most women who possess an emotional and idealistic temperament. I know, nevertheless, that the three months of the year my father spent at home—the round voyage usually lasting about nine months—were always to my mother a long-expected period of happiness, a kind of annual honeymoon. Thus when together they always remained like young lovers. I count it my good fortune that never once in the home-life of my childhood was I the witness of any conjugal jar. The unimpaired reverence for women and respect for domestic relationships, with which I set out, permanently coloured my whole conception of life.

When I survey my ancestral stocks as a whole from the eugenic standpoint I can find little that seems in the slightest degree unbalanced or unsound. In no direction is there any obvious special liability to disease, and in 211 branches there is a fair, though not extreme, degree of longevity. I write this in my forty-third year, in good health and in entire freedom from any organic disease, and I consider that—if I am to die a natural death—I may reasonably expect to live until I am sixty. As regards mental soundness, I see no definitely weak point. It has often been said in my time that an insane heredity is without significance because insanity is found in all families. If one goes far enough it is certainly true that one must needs find insanity at last, but in an unqualified shape the statement is misleading. One of my numerous cousins, whose mother was an Ellis, once fell for a time into a condition that might well be called insane, but this girl's father belonged to an unquestionably morbid family. As far as I know, the Grays were a sound family, while such morbid traits as the Wheatleys presented were slight, and the restless energy of the Olivers never degenerated into insanity in any member at all nearly related to me. In my mother there was a latent nervousness which I have inherited in a heightened degree; it renders me in some ways an abnormal person, though scarcely morbid. This nervousness is the servant of my intellect and disciplined by my will; it is never likely to be degraded into insanity. I dimly feel that, however wide and apparently eccentric the orbit in which it seems to move, my life will in the end be found to have followed a rounded harmonious course, at one with Nature.

[Some passages in this chapter were obviously inserted by the author some time after completing his original manuscript. This will be noted elsewhere throughout the book.]