Moreover, when the parsons themselves have proved immune to that peculiarity of the clerical environment, it has wrought magically upon their children, and an even longer list could be made, including such great names as Goldsmith, Jane Austen and the Brontes, of the sons and daughters of parsons who have done good or indifferent work as poets or as novelists. Most of the novelists moulded by such early influences have leaned rather to ideal or to glamorously or grimly romantic than to plainly realistic interpretations of life and character, and J. D. Beresford is so seldom romantic, or idealistic, so often realistically true to secular and unregenerate aspects of human nature, that, if he did not draw his clerical characters with such evident inside knowledge, you would not suspect that in his beginnings he had been subject to the limitations and repressions that necessarily obtain in an ecclesiastical household. He was born in Castor rectory, and his father was a minor canon and precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, and, if it pleases you, you can play with a theory that the stark realism with which he handles the facts, even the uglier facts, of modern life is either a reaction from the narrow horizon that cramped his youthful days, or that the outlook of the paternal rectory was broader than the outlook of rectories usually is. After an education at Oundel, and at King’s School, Peterborough, he was apprenticed, first to an architect in the country, then to one in London; but before long he abandoned architecture to go into an insurance office, and left that to take up a post with W. H. Smith & Son, in the Strand where he became a sort of advertising expert and was placed at the head of a bookselling department with a group of country travellers under his control.