park-like grounds, and inhabited in after years by Kinglake’s younger brother Hamilton, who succeeded his uncle in the medical profession, and passed away, amid deep and universal regret, in 1898. Here during the thirties Sydney Smith was a frequent and a welcome visitor; it was in answer to old Mrs. Kinglake that he uttered his audacious _mot_ on being asked if he would object, as a neighbouring clergyman had done, to bury a Dissenter: “Not bury Dissenters? I should like to be burying them all day!” Taunton was an innutrient foster-mother, _arida nutrix_, for such young lions as the Kinglake brood. Two hundred years before it had been a prosperous and famous place, its woollen and kersey trades, with the population they supported, ranking it as eighth in order among English towns. Its inhabitants were then a gallant race, republican in politics, Puritan in creed. Twice besieged by Goring and Lumford, it had twice repelled the Royalists with loss. It was the centre of Monmouth’s rebellion and of Jeffrey’s vengeance; the suburb of Tangier, hard by its ancient castle, still recalls the time when Colonel Kirke and his regiment of “Lambs” were quartered in the town. But long before the advent of the Kinglakes its glory had departed; its manufactures had died out, its society become Philistine and bourgeois—“little men who walk in narrow ways”—while from pre-eminence in electoral venality among English boroughs it was saved only by the near proximity of Bridgewater. A noted statesman who, at a later period, represented it in Parliament, used to say that by only one family besides Dr. Hamilton Kinglake’s could he be received with any sense of social or intellectual equality. Not much, however, of Kinglake’s time was given to his native town: he was early sent to the Grammar School at Ottery St. Mary’s, the “Clavering” of “Pendennis,” whose Dr. Wapshot was George Coleridge, brother of the poet. He was wont in after life to speak of this time with bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an eloquent passage in “Eothen” depicts his intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund-grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. “The dismal change is ordained, and then—thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani,’—from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by commentators, and served out by school-masters!”