“I was sent to school at the early age of eight, to accompany my elder brother. It was a preparatory school for Winchester, and the best feature about it was the Winchester custom, called ‘standing up,’ which means that we were encouraged to learn a great deal of poetry by heart, for which we got extra marks at the end of the half year. We were allowed (within limits) to choose our own poets, and I always chose Scott from family tradition, and in this way learned the whole of the ‘Lady of the Lake,’ and most of the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel’ and ‘Marmion,’ by heart, and can repeat much of them to this day. Milton reckoned highest for marks, but I was prejudiced against him in this wise: Not far from the school was Addington, a place of the then Duke of Buckingham, who was also a friend of my grandfather, who, with my grandmother, paid him a visit at the end of our first half year. We went over to sleep, and travel back home next day with the old folk, and in the morning before starting, the Duchess gave us each a sovereign, neatly wrapped up in white, glossy paper. It was the first piece of gold I ever had, and I kept it in my hand to look at on the journey. I was leaning out of the window of the carriage when my attention was suddenly called to some roadside sight, and I dropped the precious metal. My shout of anguish and dismay brought the carriage to a stand-still, and I had to confess. After some trouble my sovereign was found, and taken charge of by my grandmother, who, in due course, returned it to me, no longer in current coin of the realm, but in the shape of a pocket edition of Milton’s poems, with ‘Thomas Hughes from the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos’ written on the title page. I still possess the odious small volume, and have learnt to forgive the great Puritan,—indeed, I have read Masson’s life of him with real interest in these latter days. But I never learnt a line of him by heart as a boy, and regret it to this day. “Those were evil days in Wessex, the time of the Swing riots and machine and rick burning. My father was the most active magistrate in the district, and was constantly in the saddle, keeping the King’s peace. He was an old fashioned Tory, but with true popular sympathies, and had played cricket and football all his life with the men and boys of our village, and it is one of my proudest memories that only one man from Uffington joined the rioters, and he came back after three weeks ashamed and penitent. Amongst other good deeds, my father rode off alone one night and saved the house and chapel of a dissenting minister in a neighboring village from being sacked and burned. Nevertheless I can not pretend to say that I was brought up to look upon dissenters as anything but a stiff-necked and perverse generation.