My father was a perfectly honest man, and hated shiftiness even worse than downright lying. The only time he gave me a thrashing was for prevarication. He had a plain, but not a dull mind, and loved poetry of a sublime cast, especially Milton. I can hear him even now repeat passages from the _Comus_, which was a special favourite. Elsewhere I have told how when he was young and stood at the composing desk in his printing office, he used to declaim Byron by heart. That a Puritan printer, one of the last men in the world to be carried away by a fashion, should be vanquished by Byron, is as genuine a testimony as any I know to the reality of his greatness. Up to 1849 or thereabouts, my father in religion was Independent and Calvinist, the creed which, as he thought then, best suited him. But a change was at hand. His political opinions remained unaltered to his death, but in 1851 he had completed his discovery that the “simple gospel” which Calvinism preached was by no means simple, but remarkably abstruse. It was the _Heroes and Hero Worship_ and the _Sartor Resartus_ which drew him away from the meeting-house. There is nothing in these two books directly hostile either to church or dissent, but they laid hold on him as no books had ever held, and the expansion they wrought in him could not possibly tolerate the limitations of orthodoxy. He was not converted to any other religion. He did not run for help to those who he knew could not give it. His portrait; erect, straightforward-looking, firmly standing, one foot a little in advance, helps me and decides me when I look at it. Of all types of humanity the one which he represents would be the most serviceable to the world at the present day. He was generous, open-hearted, and if he had a temper, a trifle explosive at times, nobody for whom he cared ever really suffered from it, and occasionally it did him good service. The chief obituary notice of him declared with truth that he was the best public speaker Bedford ever had, and the committee of the well-known public library resolved unanimously “That this institution records with regret the death of Mr. W. White, formerly and for many years an active and most valuable member of the committee, whose special and extensive knowledge of books was always at its service, and to whom the library is indebted for the acquisition of its most rare and valuable books.” The first event in my own life is the attack by the mob upon our house, at the general election in 1832, to which I have referred. My cradle—as I have been told—had to be carried from the front bedroom into the back, so that my head might not be broken by the stones which smashed the windows. [Picture: Mark Rutherford’s Father]