any conclusion, she would say:  “I cannot help it; things flash across me.”  That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks, and it has always been a danger.  But, after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother-wit.

Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at sixty-six “as active and energetic as a young woman.”  To her he was devoted.

As a child my love for her was a passion.  I have lain awake for hours crying because I had a morbid fear of her death; her approbation was my greatest reward, her displeasure my greatest punishment.

About his childhood, he writes,

I have next to nothing to say.  In after years my mother, looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, “Ah! you were such a pretty boy!” whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks.  In fact, I have a distinct recollection of certain curls of which I was vain, and of a conviction that I closely resembled that handsome, courtly gentleman, Sir Herbert Oakley, who was vicar of our parish, and who was as a god to us country folk because he was occasionally visited by the then Prince George of Cambridge.  I remember turning my pinafore wrong side forwards in order to represent a surplice, and preaching to my mother’s maids in the kitchen as nearly as possible in Sir Herbert’s manner one Sunday morning, when the rest of the family were at church.  That is the earliest indication of the strong clerical affinities which my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer has always ascribed to me, though I fancy they have, for the most part, remained in a latent state.

He was not a precocious child, nor pushed forward by early instruction.  His native talent for drawing, had it been cultivated, might have brought him into the front rank of artists; but on the perverse principle, then common, that training is either useless to native capacity or ruins it, he remained untaught, and his vigorous draughtsmanship, invaluable as it was in his scientific career, never reached its full technical perfection.  But the sketches which he delighted to make on his travels reveal the artist’s eye, if not his trained hand.

His regular schooling was of the scantiest.  For two years, from the age of eight to ten, he was at the Ealing school.  It was a semi-public school of the old unreformed type.  What did a little boy learn there?  The rudiments of Latin, of arithmetic, and divinity may be regarded as certain.  Greek is improbable, and, in fact, I think my father had no school foundation to build upon when he took up Greek at the age of fifty-five in order to read in the original precisely what Aristotle had written, and not what he was said to have written, about his dissection of the heart.