Daniel’s second son, Thomas Robert, familiarly known as Robert, was born at the Rookery on 14th February, 1766, the year when Rousseau came to England. His mother seems to have died before her husband; she is not mentioned in our meagre biographies.[949] His father, full of the teaching of the Émile, and by no means prejudiced by his Oxford experience in favour of the ordinary conventional training of the English youth, seems to have sent his sons to no public school of any kind, and in all probability brought them up at home under his own eye for the first eight or nine years of their life. We may think of Robert, therefore, as passing his childhood without privation, if without luxury, in the home of an English country gentleman of moderate fortune, who was devoted to books and botany, fireside and hillside philosophizing,[950] and the improvement of his house and grounds,—a man full of life and originality, gifted with vigorous health, and joining in his boys’ walks and games.[951] In his quiet little valley it was easy for Daniel Malthus to picture to himself a Millennial Hall of the future in store for every one else, on the type of his own Rookery, with no worse interruption than the rooks that cawed there nightly on the hill above him. From his son’s description[952] and his own letters, we gather that he was one of the best sort of the Enlightened followers of Nature. He knew Rousseau personally, and became his executor;[953] but they were liker in views than in character; Daniel Malthus had a deeper vein of reverence and a stronger inclination to put theory into practice.[954] The neighbours thought him an amiable and clever man who was an ornament to his parish, but decidedly eccentric, for he made few friends and was fondest of his own and his children’s company.[955] He was versed beyond his compeers in French and German literature, or he would hardly have been credited with having translated _Paul et Virginie_, D’Ermenonville’s _Essay on Landscape_, and the _Sorrows of Werther_. We have Robert’s authority for saying that, although he wrote no translations, he wrote many pieces that were very successful, but always anonymous.[956] With much of his son’s talent, he had no power, like his son’s, of sustained intellectual effort.