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