His recreations were, as a rule, literary, and consisted in a change of mental occupation.  The only times I can remember his playing an outdoor game are in the late sixties, when he started his elder children at cricket on the common at Littlehampton, and in 1871 when he played golf at St. Andrews.  When first married, he promised his wife to reserve Saturday afternoons for recreation, and constantly went with her to the Ella concerts.  About 1861 she urged him to take exercise by joining Mr. Herbert Spencer at racquets; but the pressure of work before long absorbed all his time.  In his youth he was extremely fond of chess, and played eagerly with his fellow-students at Charing Cross Hospital or with his messmates on board the “Rattlesnake”.  But after he taught me the game, somewhere about 1869 or 1870, I do not think he ever found time for it again.

His principal exercise was walking during the holidays.  In his earlier days especially, when overwrought by the stress of his life in London, he used to go off with a friend for a week’s walking tour in Wales or the Lakes, in Brittany or the Eifel country, or in summer for a longer trip to Switzerland.  In this way he “burnt up the waste products,” as he would say, of his town life, and came back fresh for a new spell of unintermittent work.

But on the whole, the amount of exercise he took was insufficient for his bodily needs.  Even the riding prescribed for him when he first broke down, became irksome, and was not continued very long, although his bodily machine was such as could only be kept in perfect working order by more exercise than he would give.  His physique was not adapted to burn up the waste without special stimulus.  I remember once, as he and I were walking up Beachy Head, we passed a man with a splendid big chest.  “Ah,” said my father regretfully, “if I had only had a chest like that, what a lot of work I could have done.”

When, in 1872, he built his new house in Marlborough Place, my father bargained for two points; one, that each member of the family should have a corner of his or her own, where, as he used to say, it would be possible to “consume their own smoke”; the other, that the common living-rooms should be of ample size.  Thus from 1874 onwards he was enabled to see something of his many friends who would come as far as St. John’s Wood on a Sunday evening.  No formal invitation for a special day was needed.  The guests came, before supper or after, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, as on any ordinary at-home day.  There was a simple informal meal at 6.30 or 7 o’clock, which called itself by no more dignified name than high tea—­was, in fact, a cold supper with varying possibilities in the direction of dinner or tea.  It was a chance medley of old and young—­friends of the parents and friends of the children, but all ultimately centring round the host himself, whose end of the table never flagged for conversation, grave or gay.