1835-1841.

My childhood is passed at Burnley with my aunts.—My grandfather and grandmother.—Estrangement between Gilbert Hamerton and his brother of Hellifield Peel.—Death of Gilbert Hamerton.—His taste for the French language.—His travels in Portugal, and the conduct of a steward during his absence.—His three sons.—Aristocratic tendencies of his daughters.—Beginning of my education.—Visits to my father.

I was not brought up during childhood under my father's roof, but was sent to live with his two unmarried sisters. These ladies were then living in Burnley with their mother.

Burnley is now a large manufacturing town of seventy thousand inhabitants, but in those days it was just rising in importance, and a few years earlier it had been a small country town in an uncommonly aristocratic neighborhood. The gate of Towneley Park opens now almost upon the town itself, and in former times there were many other seats of the greater or lesser squires within a radius of a very few miles. It is a common mistake in the south of England to suppose that Lancashire is a purely commercial county. There are, or were in my youth, some very aristocratic neighborhoods in Lancashire, and that immediately about Burnley was one of them. The creation of new wealth, and the extinction or departure of a few families, may have altered its character since then, but in the days of my grandfather nobody thought of disputing the supremacy of the old houses. There was something almost sublime in the misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the history of Lancashire.

My grandfather, Gilbert Hamerton, possessed an old gabled mansion with a small but picturesque estate, divided from Towneley Park by a public road, and he had other property in the town and elsewhere enough to make him independent, but not enough to make him one of the great squires. However, as he was the second son of an ancient Yorkshire family, and as pedigrees and quarterings counted for something in those comparatively romantic times, the somewhat exclusive aristocracy about Burnley had received him with much cordiality from the first, and he continued all his life to belong to it. His comparative poverty was excused by a well-known history of confiscation in his family, and perhaps made him rather more interesting, especially as it did not go far enough to become—what poverty becomes so easily—ridiculous. He lived in a large old house, and plentifully enough, but without state and style. His marriage had been extremely imprudent from the worldly point of view. An aunt of my grandfather's, on his mother's side, had invited him to stay with her, and had not foreseen the attractions of a farmer's daughter who was living in the house as a companion. My good, unworldly grandfather fell in love with this girl, and married her. He never had any serious reason to regret this very imprudent step, for Jane Smith became an excellent wife and mother, and she did not even injure his position in society, where she knew how to make herself respected, and was much beloved by her most intimate friends. I remember her, though I never knew my grandfather. My recollection of her is a sort of picture of an old lady always dressed in black, and seated near a window, or walking slowly with a stick. The dawn of reason and feeling is associated in my memory with an intense affection for this old lady and with the kind things she said to me, not yet forgotten. I remember, too, the awful stillness of her dead body (hers was the first dead human body I looked upon), and the strange emptiness of the house when it had been taken away.

Though my grandmother was only a farmer's daughter, her parents were well-to-do in their own line of life, and at various times helped my grandfather with sums of money; but the fact remained that he had married quite out of his class, and it has always seemed to me probable that the marriage may have had some connection with the complete and permanent estrangement that existed between Gilbert Hamerton and his brother, the squire of Hellifield Peel. As soon as I was old enough to understand a little about relationships, I reflected that the houses of my own uncles were open to me, that my cousins were all like brothers and sisters to me, and yet that my father and my aunts had never been to their uncle's house at Hellifield, and that our relations there never came to see us at Burnley. The explanation of this estrangement given by my grandfather, was that there had been a disagreement about land; but perhaps he may have felt some delicacy about telling his children that his unambitious marriage had contributed to render the separation permanent. However this may have been, my grandmother never once saw the inside of her brother-in-law's house, and when she died there was, I believe, not even the formal expression of condolence that is usual among acquaintances. Gilbert Hamerton had lived at Hollins, a house and estate inherited from his mother; and James Hamerton, the elder brother, lived in a castellated peel or border tower at Hellifield, which had been built by Lawrence Hamerton in 1440. The two places are not much more than twenty miles apart; but the brothers never met after their quarrel, and my grandfather's sons and daughters never saw their uncle's house. One result of the estrangement was that we hardly seemed to belong to our own family; and I remember a lady, who had some very vague and shadowy claims to a distant connection with the family at Hellifield, asking one of my aunts in a rather patronizing manner if she also did not "claim to be connected" with the Hamertons of Hellifield Peel. Even to this day it is difficult for me to realize the simple fact that she was niece to an uncle whom she had never seen, and first cousin to his successor.

My grandfather had lived in apparently excellent health till the age of seventy-seven, when one afternoon as he was seated in his dining-room at Hollins, nobody being present except his eldest daughter Mary, he asked her to open the window, and then added, "Say a prayer." She immediately began to repeat a short prayer, and before she had reached the end of it he was dead. There is a strange incident connected with his death, which may be worth something to those who take an interest in what is now called "Psychical Research." At the same hour his married daughter was sitting in a room forty miles away with her little boy, a child just old enough to talk, and the child stared with intense interest at an empty chair. His mother asked what attracted his attention, and the child said, "Don't you see, mamma, the old gentleman who is sitting in that chair?" I am careful not to add details, as my own imagination might unconsciously amplify them, but my impression is that the child was asked to describe the vision more minutely, and that his description exactly accorded with his grandfather's usual appearance.

The old gentleman preserved the costume and manners of the eighteenth century, wearing his pig-tail, breeches, and shoe-buckles. He took life too easily for any intellectual achievements, but he had a great liking for the French language, and wrote a very original French grammar, which he had curiously printed in synoptic sheets, at his private expense, though it was never completed or published. I have sometimes thought it possible that my own aptitude and affinity for that language may have been inherited from him, and that his labors may in a manner have overcome many difficulties for me by the wonderful process of transmission. He never lived in France, and I believe he never visited the country, his French conversations being chiefly held with a good-natured Roman Catholic chaplain at Towneley Hall. My grandfather's most extensive travels were in Portugal, lasting six months, and with regard to that journey I remember two painful incidents. His travelling companion, a younger brother, died abroad, in consequence of having slept in a damp bed. The other incident is vexatious rather than tragical, and yet Wordsworth would have seen tragedy in it also. During his absence from home, my grandfather had confided the care of his estate to an agent, who cut down the old avenue of oaks that led to the house, on the pretext that some of the trees were showing signs of decay, and that he had an acceptable offer for the whole. The road retained the name of "The Avenue" for many years, but the trees were never replaced.

Perhaps the reader will think this incident hardly worth mentioning, but to a lover of trees, avenues, and old houses, such as I confess myself to be, it seems the very perfection of a vexatious incident. I cannot imagine anything whatever, not entailing any serious consequences, that would have tried my own temper more.

On my grandfather's death, the whole of his property went to his eldest son. He had brought up all his three sons to be solicitors, not because he had any peculiar enthusiasm for the legal profession, but simply as the readiest means of earning a living. The sons themselves had no natural affinity for the law; my eldest uncle heartily disliked it, the other regarded it with cool indifference, and my father expressed his desire that I should never be a lawyer, on the ground that a man had enough to plague him in his own concerns without troubling his mind about those of other people. One curious distinction may be noted here, as the result probably of that intermingling with the every-day world, which happens naturally in the career of provincial attorneys. Whilst my aunts remained all their lives aristocratic in their feelings, and rather liked to enjoy the hospitality of the great houses in the neighborhood, my uncles, and my father also, abandoned all aristocratic memories and aspirations, and entered frankly into the middle class. Each of them did what was natural under the circumstances. Women are generally more aristocratic than men, and cling more decidedly to their class, and I think my aunts showed better taste in liking refined society than my father did in lowering himself to associate with men of an inferior stamp in rank, in manners, and in habits. I distinctly remember how one of my aunts told me that somebody had made a remark on her liking for great people, and the only comment she made was, that she preferred gentlefolks because their manners were more agreeable. She was not a worshipper of rank, but she liked the quiet, pleasant manners of the aristocracy, which indeed were simply her own manners.

My childhood could not have been better cared for, even by my own mother, than by these two excellent ladies. They gave me a beginning of education, and they have told me since that I learned to read English with the greatest facility, so that when I was sent to the Grammar School at Burnley, at the early age of five and a half, the master considered me so well forward that I was set at once to Latin. In those days it was a part of the wisdom of our educators to make us learn Latin out of a grammar written in that language, and I retain some recollection of the perfectly useless mental fatigue and puzzlement that I was made to undergo in learning abstract statements about grammatical science that were written in a tongue which I could not possibly understand. The idea of taking a child five and a half years old, and making it learn a dead language by abstract rules, is of itself a great error. The proper way to teach a child Latin is simply to give it a vocabulary, including only the things that it can see or imagine, and a few verbs to make little phrases. I had learned to read English so easily that good hopes were entertained for the rest of my education, but my progress in Latin was very slow, and the only result of my early training was to give me a horror of everything printed in Latin, that I did not overcome for many years.

There was another child-pupil rather older than I, and the head-master of those days (Dr. Butler's predecessor), who had a rude disposition, sometimes amused himself by putting me on one of his knees, and the other little boy on the other knee, after which, by an adroit simultaneous movement of the two legs, he suddenly brought our heads into collision. I quite remember the sensation of being stunned on these occasions, but am not aware that my Latin was any the better for it.

My recollection of those early years is extremely vague, and there is little in them that could interest the reader. I was taken once or twice a year to my father, and always disliked and dreaded those visits, as I feared him greatly, and with good reason. On one of these visits, when quite a child, I persuaded my father's groom to let me mount his saddle-horse, which I remember as a gray animal of what seemed a prodigious altitude. The man put me on the horse's back, and being entirely destitute of common-sense or prudence, actually gave me a whip and left the bridle to me. I applied the whip vigorously, and was very soon thrown off and carried back to the house covered with blood, happily without more serious consequences. Another little incident has more of the comic element. My father employed a tailor for himself, and told the man to make me a suit without entering into any particulars. The tailor being thus left to his own wisdom, made a costume that was the exact copy of a full-grown squire's dress on a small scale. It was composed of a green cut-away coat, a yellow waistcoat, and green trousers, the whole adorned with gilt buttons. The tailor dressed me, and then, proud of his work, presented me to my father and the ladies. If the tailor was proud, my pride and satisfaction were at least equal to his, and we neither of us could in the least understand the roars of laughter that my appearance provoked, whilst our feelings were deeply wounded by my father's tyrannical decree that I was never to wear those beautiful clothes at all. Even to this day I am capable of regretting that suit, and certainly I often see children now whose costumes are at least equally absurd.