The fact that the word ‘Carmine’ appeared as the goal of my visionary pursuits is not so inexplicable as it may seem.  My Father was at this time producing numerous water-colour drawings of minute and even of microscopic forms of life.  These he executed in the manner of miniature, with an amazing fidelity of form and with a brilliancy of colour which remains unfaded after fifty years.  By far the most costly of his pigments was the intense crimson which is manufactured out of the very spirit and, essence of cochineal.  I had lately become a fervent imitator of his works of art, and I was allowed to use all of his colours, except one; I was strictly forbidden to let a hair of my paint-brush touch the little broken mass of carmine which was all that he possessed.  We believed, but I do not know whether this could be the fact, that carmine of this superlative quality was sold at a guinea a cake.  ‘Carmine’, therefore, became my shibboleth of self-indulgence; it was a symbol of all that taste and art and wealth could combine to produce.  I imagined, for instance, that at Belshazzar’s feast, the loftiest epergne of gold, surrounded by flowers and jewels, carried the monarch’s proudest possession, a cake of carmine.  I knew of no object in the world of luxury more desirable than this, and its obsession in my waking hours is quite enough, I think, to account for ‘carmine’ having been the torment of my dreams.

The little incident of the beetle displays my Father’s mood at this period in its worst light.  His severity was not very creditable, perhaps, to his good sense, but without a word of explanation it may seem even more unreasonable than it was.  My Father might have been less stern to my lapses from high conduct, and my own mind at the same time less armoured against his arrows, if our relations had been those which exist in an ordinary religious family.  He would have been more indulgent, and my own affections might nevertheless have been more easily alienated, if I had been treated by him as a commonplace child, standing as yet outside the pale of conscious Christianity.  But he had formed the idea, and cultivated it assiduously, that I was an ame d’elite, a being to whom the mysteries of salvation had been divinely revealed and by whom they had been accepted.  I was, to his partial fancy, one in whom the Holy Ghost had already performed a real and permanent work.  Hence, I was inside the pale; I had attained that inner position which divided, as we used to say, the Sheep from the Goats.  Another little boy might be very well-behaved, but if he had not consciously ’laid hold on Christ’, his good deeds, so far, were absolutely useless.  Whereas I might be a very naughty boy, and require much chastisement from God and man, but nothing—­so my Father thought—­could invalidate my election, and sooner or later, perhaps even after many stripes, I must inevitably be brought back to a state of grace.