The Graves family was thin-nosed and inclined to petulance, but never depraved, cruel, or hysterical. A persistent literary tradition; of Richard, a minor poet and a friend of Shenstone; and John Thomas, who was a mathematician and jurist and contributed to Sir William Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions; and Richard, a divine and regius professor of Greek; and James, an archaeologist; and Robert, who invented the disease called after him and was a friend of Turner’s; and Robert, who was a classicist and theologian and a friend of Wordsworth’s; and Richard, another divine; and Robert, another divine; and other Robert’s, James’s, Thomas’s and Richard’s, and Clarissa, one of the toasts of Ireland, who married Leopold von Ranke (at Windermere Church) and linked the Graves and von Ranke families a couple of generations before my father and mother married. See the British Museum catalogue for an eighteenth and nineteenth-century record of Graves’ literary history. It was through this Clarissa-Leopold relationship that my father met my mother. My mother told him at once that she liked _Father O’Flynn_, for writing which my father will be chiefly remembered. He put the words to a traditional jig tune, _The Top of Cork Road_, which he remembered from his boyhood. Sir Charles Stanford supplied a few chords for the setting. My father sold the complete rights for a guinea. The publisher made thousands. Sir Charles Stanford, who drew a royalty as the composer, also made a very large sum. Recently my father has made a few pounds from gramophone rights. He has never been bitter about all this, but he has more than once impressed on me almost religiously never to sell for a sum down the complete rights of any work of mine whatsoever. I am glad in a way that my father was a poet. This at least saved me from any false reverence of poets, and his work was never an oppression to me. I am even very pleased when I meet people who know his work and not mine. Some of his songs I sing without prejudice; when washing up after meals or shelling peas or on similar occasions. He never once tried to teach me how to write, or showed any understanding of my serious work; he was always more ready to ask advice about his own work than to offer it for mine. He never tried to stop me writing and was glad of my first successes. His light-hearted early work is the best. His _Invention of Wine_, for instance, which begins: Ere Bacchus could talk Or dacently walk, Down Olympus he jumped From the arms of his nurse, And though ten years in all Were consumed by the fall He might have fallen further And fared a dale worse. After he married my mother and became a convinced teetotaller he lost something of this easy playfulness.