My father was as forgiving as Shakespeare in the Sonnets, and he could forget. The artist within him incessantly arranged and rearranged life, so that he lived in fairyland. Sometimes my father's and another man's account of the same incident would widely differ; but I always preferred what my father said. William Morris told my son that Kipling when a boy would come home from a days walk with stories of the day's adventures which were all fiction. I wonder if Shakespeare would always cleave to the truth in the common matters of every day. At no time did I lose respect for my father, I knew with him it was only the gentle sport of 'make believe' without which life would be intolerable to men who live by their affections. Saints and lovers and men governed by affection, poets and artists, all live in phantasy, its falsehood truer than any reality. By such falsehood we got nearer to truth. His charm to me was his veracious intellect. He would lie neither to please the sentimentalists nor the moralists. What talent I have for honest thinking I learned from him. Like every Evangelical clergyman of his kind, he regarded the Catholic Church as the Enemy, yet he never disliked it, I am convinced, as he did the Presbyterian. On leaving the University he became Curate to a clergyman in the North of Ireland. His Rector was a learned man who had published translations in verse from some early Italian poet. He was also a very bad-tempered man. I have noticed that this kind of man finds a great attraction in men who are of sweet and placable temper, as perhaps the evil angels love the righteous whom they incessantly torment and tempt but cannot persuade. The first quarrel arose because my father rode all about the parish on a spirited horse and refused to desist. The Rector wrote to him that he had hired a Curate and not a jockey. The next quarrel was about my father's preaching. Evangelicism was at the time fashionable among men of intellect, & the Rector hated Evangelicism. My father gave me an amusing account of the quarrel. He was staying, as he often did, in the Rector's house, and it was Sunday morning. There was a rapid interchange of letters beginning at six in the morning, and the argument was continued at breakfast, the ladies all on my father's side. Finally the Rector said he would preach himself that morning. As luck would have it, choosing at random among his stock of ready-made sermons, he took with him a sermon tainted with the abominable doctrine. My father described the smile that went round the Rector's pew.