impotently furious, from stem to stern of the great, lazy barges painted in a crude vehemence of vermilion and azure.  These were happy hours, when the spectre of Religion ceased to overshadow us for a little while, when my Father forgot the Apocalypse and dropped his austere phraseology, and when our bass and treble voices used to ring out together over some foolish little jest or some mirthful recollection of his past experiences.  Little soft oases these, in the hard desert of our sandy spiritual life at home.

There was an unbending, too, when we used to sing together, in my case very tunelessly.  I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice, and who had said, in the course of her last illness, ’I shall sing His praise, at length, in strains I never could master here below’.  My Father, on the other hand, had some knowledge of the principles of vocal music, although not, I am afraid, much taste.  He had at least great fondness for singing hymns, in the manner then popular with the Evangelicals, very loudly, and so slowly that I used to count how many words I could read silently, between one syllable of the singing and another.  My lack of skill did not prevent me from being zealous at these vocal exercises, and my Father and I used to sing lustily together.  The Wesleys, Charlotte Elliott (’Just as I am, without one plea’), and James Montgomery (’Forever with the Lord’) represented his predilection in hymnology.  I acquiesced, although that would not have been my independent choice.  These represented the devotional verse which made its direct appeal to the evangelical mind, and served in those ‘Puseyite’ days to counteract the High Church poetry founded on ‘The Christian Year’.  Of that famous volume I never met with a copy until I was grown up, and equally unknown in our circle were the hymns of Newman, Faber and Neale.

It was my Father’s plan from the first to keep me entirely ignorant of the poetry of the High Church, which deeply offended his Calvinism; he thought that religious truth could be sucked in, like mother’s milk, from hymns which were godly and sound, and yet correctly versified; and I was therefore carefully trained in this direction from an early date.  But my spirit had rebelled against some of these hymns, especially against those written—­a mighty multitude—­by Horatius Bonar; naughtily refusing to read Bonar’s ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’ to my Mother in our Pimlico lodgings.  A secret hostility to this particular form of effusion was already, at the age of seven, beginning to define itself in my brain, side by side with an unctuous infantile conformity.