He died at an age when the growth of the mind in all who strive after knowledge is very rapid. Had he lived a few years longer, he would have seen that the world, as a whole, is wiser than any one man in it, and that total seclusion from it is the worst of all trainings for the young. But death swept him away, and there is nothing left of him save “a fragment from his dream of human life.” The world never knew his great worth, and his brothers never forgot it. “Time, and the ordinary current of events,” wrote one of them to his father, “have had their ordinary effect of deadening the acuteness of our feelings, but at present the world wears but a dreary aspect to me.” “Believe me, my beloved son,” wrote the bereaved father a few weeks later, “that whenever troubles assail us we mechanically turn to thoughts of our children for comfort.... That you and all our offspring may be as fortunate as we respecting this first of parental rewards, the prudence and integrity of children, is our most earnest prayer. Greater good luck it were useless to hope for, almost impious to desire.” The vision that another brother raised was of a very different kind. “He had read Adam Smith’s great work as if it had been an attractive novel.” Political economy became his favourite study. Huskisson had just entered upon his reforms of our fiscal system, and the youth longed to play his part in the great work of improvement that seemed at length to have fairly begun. For him the school was too small a stage. “He longed for a wider scope, and, above all, a greater power of doing good.” Huskisson must surely stand in need, he thought, of more enlightened assistants than he had at present. Was not his progress along the path of reform timid and slow, and was not that owing to the fact that, in the offices of Government, there were few to be found but men of routine and mummery? He asked his eldest brother whether it would not be practicable to put him under Huskisson’s wing. He was reminded of the boy who wished to go apprentice to a bishop. Such dreams as these were not unnatural in young men who had lived so much to themselves. It was not till they were grown up that they began at all to mix in the world. When Rowland Hill was twenty, he mentions in his Journal two young men as “almost the only persons excepting our own family with whom I am in habits of intimacy. Indeed, I enjoy so much the society we have at home,” he says, “that I do not feel the want of a very extensive circle of friends.” “They had a little ideal world of their own,” said one who knew them well in those days. Such a world, however noble it may be, has its own dangers. The high purpose, the fixed mind, the unconquerable will, the courage never to submit or yield, may well be nourished there; but it is on a wider stage that a man best learns to measure life. They who do not master this lesson betimes find it a hard thing to master it at all; for soon custom lies upon them with a weight—