When I married Theodosia Garrow she possessed just one thousand pounds in her own right, and little or no prospect of ever possessing any more; while I on my side possessed nothing at all, save the prospect of a strictly bread and cheese competency at the death of my mother, and “the farm which I carried under my hat,” as somebody calls it.  The marriage was not made with the full approbation of my father-in-law; but entirely in accordance with the wishes of my mother, who simply, dear soul, saw in it, what she said, that “Theo” was of all the girls she knew, the one she should best like as a daughter-in-law.  And here again the wise folks of the world (and I among them!) would hardly have said that the step I then took was calculated, according to all the recognised chances and probabilities of human affairs, to lead to a life of contentment and happiness.  I suppose it ought not to have done so!  But it did!  It would be monstrously inadequate to say that I never repented it.  What should I not have lost had I not done it!

As usual my cards turned up trumps! but they began to do so in a way that caused me much, and my wife more, grief at the time.  Within two years after my marriage, poor, dear, good, loving Harriet caught small-pox and died!  She was much more largely endowed than her half-sister, to whom she bequeathed all she had.

She had a brother, as I have said above.  But he had altogether alienated himself from his family by becoming a Roman Catholic priest There was no open quarrel.  I met him frequently in after years at Garrow’s table at Torquay, and remember his bitter complaints that he was tempted by the appearance of things at table which he ought not to eat.  It would have been of no use to give or bequeath money to him, for it would have gone immediately to Romanist ecclesiastical purposes.  He had nearly stripped himself of his own considerable means, reserving to himself only the bare competence on which a Catholic priest might live.  He was altogether a very queer fish!  I remember his coming to me once in tearful but very angry mood, because, as he said, I had guilefully spread snares for his soul!  I had not the smallest comprehension of his meaning till I discovered that his woe and wrath were occasioned by my having sent him as a present Berington’s Middle Ages.  I had fancied that his course of studies and line of thought would have made the book interesting to him, utterly ignorant or oblivious of the fact that it laboured under the disqualification of appearing in the Index.

I take it I knew little about the Index in those days.  In after years, when three or four of my own books had been placed in its columns, I was better informed.  I remember a very elegant lady who having overheard my present wife mention the fact that a recently published book of mine had been placed in the Index, asked her, with the intention of being extremely polite and complimentary, whether her (my wife’s) books had been put in the Index.  And when the latter modestly replied that she had not written anything that could merit such a distinction, her interlocutor, patting her on the shoulder with a kindly and patronising air, said “Oh! my dear, I am sure they will be placed there.  They certainly ought to be!”