I have said that the move to Harrow was in some degree caused by a hope that the change might be beneficial to my father’s health. He had suffered very distressingly for many years from bilious headache, which gradually increased upon him during the whole of his life. I may say parenthetically that from about fifteen to forty I suffered occasionally, about once a fortnight perhaps, from the same malady, though in a much less intense form. But at about forty years old I seemed to have grown out of it, and since that time have never been troubled by it. But in my father’s day the common practice was to treat such complaints with calomel. He was constantly having recourse to that drug. And I believe that it had the effect of shattering his nervous system in a deplorable manner. He became increasingly irritable; never with the effect of causing him to raise a hand against any one of us, but with the effect of making intercourse with him so sure to issue in something unpleasant, that unconsciously we sought to avoid his presence, and to consider as hours of enjoyment only those that could be passed away from it. My mother’s disposition on the other hand was of the most genial, cheerful, happy, _enjoué_ nature imaginable. All our happiest hours were spent with her; and to any one of us a _tête-à-tête_ with her was preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour. But even this under all the circumstances did not tend to the general harmony and happiness of the family circle. For of course the facts and the results of them must have been visible to my father; and though wholly inoperative to produce the smallest change in his ways, must, I cannot doubt, have been painful to him. It was all very sad. My father was essentially a good man. But he was, I fear, a very unhappy one. He was extremely fond of reading aloud to the assembled family in the evening; and there was not one individual of those who heard him who would not have escaped from doing so, at almost any cost. Of course it was our duty to conceal this extreme reluctance to endure what was to him a pleasure--a duty which I much fear was very imperfectly performed. I remember--oh, how well!--the nightly readings during one winter of _Sir Charles Grandison_, and the loathing disgust for that production which they occasioned.