The words remained implanted in my memory. But I do not suppose they carried much instruction with them to my mind at the time. I believe my grandfather spent more money on his mechanical fads than was quite prudent, and took out patents which were about as remunerative and useful as that which Charles the Second is said to have granted to a sailor who stood on his head on the top of Salisbury steeple, securing to him the monopoly of that practice! I remember another eccentricity in which the vicar indulged. He said the contact of a knife’s edge with earthenware, or porcelain, was extremely disagreeable. He caused, therefore, a number of dinner plates to be made with a little circular depression some two inches in diameter and about as deep as a crown piece in the centre, and had some round pieces of silver to fit into these receptacles, on which he cut his meat. He was withal a very popular man, a good scholar, with decidedly scholarly tastes, much of a mathematician, a genuine humourist, with a sort of Horatian easy-going geniality about him, which was very charming even to us boys. My brother Henry was one year my junior; my brother Anthony, with whom the world subsequently became acquainted, was five years younger than I. Henry, therefore, was the companion of all the London rambles which have been mentioned. I think we were tolerably good boys, truthful and obedient to legitimate authority. I was, however, if nursery traditions of a somewhat later day may be accepted as embodying real facts, rather too much given to yielding obedience only on reason shown; to “argify,” as certain authoritarians are wont to call it; and to make plenary submission only when consciously defeated in argument. We had little or nothing of the “amusements” nowadays so liberally supplied to children. There was the pantomime at Christmas, intensely enjoyed. And I remember well pondering on the insoluble question, _why_ my parents, who evidently, I thought, could if they chose it, go to the theatre every night of their lives, should abstain from doing so. I do not remember any discontented longings for more or other amusements than we had. I was a thoroughly well constituted and healthy child, but without the smallest pretention to good looks, either _in esse_ or _in posse_; sturdily built, with flaxen head, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes; broad of hand and foot; strong as a little pony--a veritable Saxon in type. I seem to my recollections to have been somewhat bravely ready to accept a life, in which the kicks might be more superabundant than the halfpence, not without complacent mental reference to the moral and physical breadth of shoulders, ready for whatever fate might lay on them. The nature of my childish mind, as I remember, was to place its ideas of heroism in capacity for uncomplaining endurance, rather than in capability for mastering others.