No man, indeed, ever felt more deeply than he did the vast importance of that great part of education, which no examinations can test, and which many examiners and framers of schemes of public competition seem to treat with utter contempt. The feeling of responsibility which he speaks of did not seem to those who knew him as a child to have been, as he himself says, gradually acquired. It grew, no doubt, with exercise, but it was a part of his inbred worth. “From a very early age,” says one of his brothers, “he felt responsibility in a way none of the others of us did. If anything went wrong it was he who felt it.” He had inherited little of his father’s “buoyant optimism,” and none of his contentedness when things were going wrong. From a very early age his mother began to share with him the troubles that well-nigh weighed her down. They had only grown by her husband’s change of occupation. Matters grew worse and worse as the French War went on. “Never surely yet,” wrote her husband, “was a time when debts were collected with more difficulty, or left uncollected with more danger.” She tried more than one plan to add to the earnings of the family, and every plan she used to talk over with Rowland when he was still a mere child. At times she was terribly straightened. Her brother-in-law, Williams, “a tradesman and a scholar,” as her husband described him, once sent them in their distress a present of five pounds. “The sight of it,” wrote my grandfather, in a letter which I have before me, “produced in both of us mingled emotions of pleasure and pain. Pleasure as a strong, too strong, testimonial of your regard and affection, and pain as it could not but remind us of the toils and privations which you are undergoing to enable you to be generous as well as just. So powerful was the latter impression that our first impulse would have urged us to beg leave to return this too serious mark of affection, adopting the ‘burning words’ of David, ‘Shall we drink the blood of these men?’ but cooler consideration led to the fear that such a measure would give more pain to you than relief to ourselves.”