[Restless, talkative, untiring to the day of her death, she was at sixty-six “as active and energetic as a young woman.”  His early devotion to her was remarkable.  Describing her to his future wife he writes:—­]

As a child my love for her was a passion.  I have lain awake for hours crying because I had a morbid fear of her death; her approbation was my greatest reward, her displeasure my greatest punishment.

I have next to nothing to say about my childhood (he continues in the Autobiography).  In later years my mother, looking at me almost reproachfully, would sometimes say, “Ah! you were such a pretty boy!” whence I had no difficulty in concluding that I had not fulfilled my early promise in the matter of looks.  In fact, I have a distinct recollection of 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.

[There remains no record of his having been a very precocious child.  Indeed, it is usually the eldest child whose necessary companionship with his elders wins him this reputation.  The youngest remains a child among children longer than any other of his brothers and sisters.

One talent, however, displayed itself early.  The faculty of drawing he inherited from his father.  But on the queer principle that training is either unnecessary to natural capacity or even ruins it, he never received regular instruction in drawing; and his draughtsmanship, vigorous as it was, and a genuine medium of artistic expression as well as an admirable instrument in his own especial work, never reached the technical perfection of which it was naturally capable.

The amount of instruction, indeed of any kind, which he received was scanty in the extreme.  For a couple of years, from the age of eight to ten, he was given a taste of the unreformed public school life, where, apart from the rough and ready mode of instruction in vogue and the necessary obedience enforced to certain rules, no means were taken to reach the boys themselves, to guide them and help them in their school life.  The new-comer was left to struggle for himself in a community composed of human beings at their most heartlessly cruel age, untempered by any external influence.

Here he had little enough of mental discipline, or that deliberate training of character which is a leading object of modern education.  On the contrary, what he learnt was a knowledge of undisciplined human nature.]