The Fair Haven | Page 5

this Memoir, and Author of the work which follows it,
was born in Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, on the 5th
of February, 1832. He was my elder brother by about eighteen months.
Our father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of
unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very moderate
income when my brother and myself were about three and four years
old. My father died some five or six years afterwards, and we only
recollected him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate who
doted upon us both and never spoke unkindly. The charm of such a
recollection can never be dispelled; both my brother and myself
returned his love with interest, and cherished his memory with the most
affectionate regret, from the day on which he left us till the time came
that the one of us was again to see him face to face. So sweet and
winning was his nature that his slightest wish was our law- -and
whenever we pleased him, no matter how little, he never failed to thank
us as though we had done him a service which we should have had a
perfect right to withhold. How proud were we upon any of these

occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being thanked! He
did indeed well know the art of becoming idolised by his children, and
dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency; yet truly there
was no art about it; all arose spontaneously from the wellspring of a
sympathetic nature which knew how to feel as others felt, whether old
or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish. On one point alone did he
neglect us--I refer to our religious education. On all other matters he
was the kindest and most careful teacher in the world. Love and
gratitude be to his memory!
My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of a
quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection. She must have
been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still comely
when we first remembered her; she was also highly accomplished, but
she felt my father's loss of fortune more keenly than my father himself,
and it preyed upon her mind, though rather for our sake than for her
own. Had we not known my father we should have loved her better
than any one in the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my
father spoiled us for any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I
remember my mother's telling me, with many tears, how jealous she
had often been of the love we bore him, and how mean she had thought
it of him to entrust all scolding or repression to her, so that he might
have more than his due share of our affection. Not that I believe my
father did this consciously; still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare
say we might often have got off scot free when we really deserved
reproof had not my mother undertaken the onus of scolding us herself.
We therefore naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing
more we loved less. For as love casteth out fear, so fear love.
This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the
way to bear it. She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving her as
much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we could succeed in
doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not be detailed.
Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her affection for us was
unsurpassable still, we loved her less than we loved my father, and this
was the grievance.

My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother. He
was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and a
thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he
conceived, and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should first
teach her children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to them a
knowledge of the One in whom we live and move and have our being.
My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness
of view--the natural but deplorable result of her earlier
surroundings--she was one of the most truly pious women whom I have
ever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained in the
lowest school of Evangelical literalism--a school which in after life
both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacle to the
complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore looked upon it with
something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I still