As far as my recollection serves me, our moral and religious education led us to consider the whole duty of boy to be summed up in the two precepts, “obey,” and “tell no lies.” I think there was a perfunctory saying of some portion of the catechism on a Sunday morning. But I am very sure that in our own minds, and apparently in those of all concerned, the vastly superior importance of the Virgil lesson admitted of no moment’s doubt. But it must not be imagined from this that my parents were more irreligious people than their neighbours; still less that they were not most affectionately and indeed supremely solicitous for the well-being and education of their children. My father was the son of a priest of the Church of England, and my mother the daughter of another, the Rev. William Milton, Vicar of Heckfield, a New College living not far from Reading. Their associates were mainly barristers or clergy. My father was wholly and absolutely free from the prevailing vice of the time, and I never remember to have seen him in any slightest degree the worse for drink. And in the whole _manière d’être_ of the house and home there was no note or symptom of any life save one of the most correct respectability and propriety, fully up to the average of the time. But my parents were by no means what was called in the language of the time “evangelicals.” And in the social atmosphere of those days, any more decided and marked amount of religious instruction and teaching would have unmistakably indicated “evangelical tendencies.” Moreover, though I cannot remember, and it is exceedingly improbable, that any ideas were directly instilled into our minds on the subject, it certainly is the fact that I grew into boyhood with the notion that “evangelicalism” or “low churchism” was a note of vulgarity--a sort of thing that might be expected to be met with in tradesmen’s back parlours, and “academies,” where the youths who came from such places were instructed in English grammar and arithmetic, but was not to be met with, and was utterly out of place, among gentlemen and in gentlemanlike places of education, where nothing of the kind was taught. All this to mark the change of _tempora_ and _mores_, in these as in so many other respects, since George the Third was king.