the wide revival of Conscience, and when my grandfather, by his reckless expenditure, which he never checked till ruin was upon him, was obliged to sell his estate, and live in penury, my Mother was the only member of the family who did not regret the change.  For my own part, I believe I should have liked my reprobate maternal grandfather, but his conduct was certainly very vexatious.  He died, in his eightieth year, when I was nine months old.

It was a curious coincidence that life had brought both my parents along similar paths to an almost identical position in respect to religious belief.  She had started from the Anglican standpoint, he from the Wesleyan, and each, almost without counsel from others, and after varied theological experiments, had come to take up precisely the same attitude towards all divisions of the Protestant Church—­that, namely, of detached and unbiased contemplation.  So far as the sects agreed with my Father and my Mother, the sects were walking in the light; wherever they differed from them, they had slipped more or less definitely into a penumbra of their own making, a darkness into which neither of my parents would follow them.  Hence, by a process of selection, my Father and my Mother alike had gradually, without violence, found themselves shut outside all Protestant communions, and at last they met only with a few extreme Calvinists like themselves, on terms of what may almost be called negation—­with no priest, no ritual, no festivals, no ornament of any kind, nothing but the Lord’s Supper and the exposition of Holy Scripture drawing these austere spirits into any sort of cohesion.  They called themselves ‘the Brethren’, simply; a title enlarged by the world outside into ‘Plymouth Brethren’.

It was accident and similarity which brought my parents together at these meetings of the Brethren.  Each was lonely, each was poor, each was accustomed to a strenuous intellectual self-support.  He was nearly thirty-eight, she was past forty-two, when they married.  From a suburban lodging, he brought her home to his mother’s little house in the northeast of London without a single day’s honeymoon.  My Father was a zoologist, and a writer of books on natural history; my Mother also was a writer, author already of two slender volumes of religious verse—­the earlier of which, I know not how, must have enjoyed some slight success, since a second edition was printed—­afterwards she devoted her pen to popular works of edification.  But how infinitely removed in their aims, their habits, their ambitions from ‘literary’ people of the present day, words are scarcely adequate to describe.  Neither knew nor cared about any manifestation of current literature.  For each there had been no poet later than Byron, and neither had read a romance since, in childhood, they had dipped into the Waverley Novels as they appeared in succession.  For each the various forms of imaginative and scientific literature were merely means of improvement and profit, which kept the student ‘out of the world’, gave him full employment, and enabled him to maintain himself.  But pleasure was found nowhere but in the Word of God, and to the endless discussion of the Scriptures each hurried when the day’s work was over.