A. W. Kinglake | Page 3

for Homer. A tradition
is preserved in the family that on the day of her funeral, at a churchyard
five miles away, he was missed from the household group reassembled
in the mourning home; he was found to have ordered his horse, and
galloped back in the darkness to his mother's grave. Forty years later he
writes to Alexander Knox: "The death of a mother has an almost
magical power of recalling the home of one's childhood, and the almost
separate world that rests upon affection." Of his two sisters, one was
well read and agreeably talkative, noted by Thackeray as the cleverest
woman he had ever met; the other, Mrs. Acton, was a delightful old
esprit fort, as I knew her in the sixties, "pagan, I regret to say," but not
a little resembling her brother in the point and manner of her wit. The
family moved in his infancy to an old-fashioned handsome "Wilton
House," adjoining closely to the town, but standing amid spacious
park-like grounds, and inhabited in after years by Kinglake's younger
brother Hamilton, who succeeded his uncle in the medical profession,
and passed away, amid deep and universal regret, in 1898. Here during
the thirties Sydney Smith was a frequent and a welcome visitor; it was
in answer to old Mrs. Kinglake that he uttered his audacious mot on
being asked if he would object, as a neighbouring clergyman had done,
to bury a Dissenter: "Not bury Dissenters? I should like to be burying
them all day!"
Taunton was an innutrient foster-mother, arida nutrix, for such young
lions as the Kinglake brood. Two hundred years before it had been a
prosperous and famous place, its woollen and kersey trades, with the

population they supported, ranking it as eighth in order among English
towns. Its inhabitants were then a gallant race, republican in politics,
Puritan in creed. Twice besieged by Goring and Lumford, it had twice
repelled the Royalists with loss. It was the centre of Monmouth's
rebellion and of Jeffrey's vengeance; the suburb of Tangier, hard by its
ancient castle, still recalls the time when Colonel Kirke and his
regiment of "Lambs" were quartered in the town. But long before the
advent of the Kinglakes its glory had departed; its manufactures had
died out, its society become Philistine and bourgeois--"little men who
walk in narrow ways"-- while from pre-eminence in electoral venality
among English boroughs it was saved only by the near proximity of
Bridgewater. A noted statesman who, at a later period, represented it in
Parliament, used to say that by only one family besides Dr. Hamilton
Kinglake's could he be received with any sense of social or intellectual
equality.
Not much, however, of Kinglake's time was given to his native town:
he was early sent to the Grammar School at Ottery St. Mary's, the
"Clavering" of "Pendennis," whose Dr. Wapshot was George Coleridge,
brother of the poet. He was wont in after life to speak of this time with
bitterness; a delicate child, he was starved on insufficient diet; and an
eloquent passage in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the
varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to
the regulation gerund- grinding and Procrustean discipline of school.
"The dismal change is ordained, and then--thin meagre Latin with small
shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your
early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel
grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds
and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down
you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of 'Scriptores
Romani,'--from Greek poetry, down, down to the cold rations of 'Poetae
Graeci,' cut up by commentators, and served out by school- masters!"
At Eton--under Keate, as all readers of "Eothen" know--he was
contemporary with Gladstone, Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning and
Dalhousie, Selwyn, Shadwell. He wrote in the "Etonian," created and
edited by Mackworth Praed; and is mentioned in Praed's poem on Surly

Hall as
"Kinglake, dear to poetry, And dear to all his friends."
Dr. Gatty remembers his "determined pale face"; thinks that he made
his mark on the river rather than in the playing fields, being a good oar
and swimmer. His great friend at school was Savile, the "Methley" of
his travels, who became successively Lord Pollington and Earl of
Mexborough. The Homeric lore which Methley exhibited in the Troad,
is curiously illustrated by an Eton story, that in a pugilistic encounter
with Hoseason, afterwards an Indian Cavalry officer, while the latter
sate between the rounds upon his second's knee, Savile strutted about
the ring, spouting Homer.
Kinglake entered at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1828, among an
exceptionally brilliant set--Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John Sterling,
Trench, Spedding, Spring Rice, Charles Buller, Maurice, Monckton
Milnes, J. M. Kemble,