but with a flourishing graft of
the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people
who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by
the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in
great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at
other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the
intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one
with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a
tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and
successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making
connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing
of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an
aristocratic position. But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for
"those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming
an independent opinion by reading Potter's _AEschylus_, and dipping into
Francis's _Horace_. To this negative view he added a positive one,
derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that a
scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son.
Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to
encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had
said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who
one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here
and there in an exploratory, auspicious manner--then placed each of his
great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and
stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to
displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his
thumbs across my eyebrows--

"The deficiency is there, sir--there; and here," he added, touching the
upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. That must be brought out,
sir, and this must be laid to sleep."

I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the
object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred--hatred
of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to
buy and cheapen it.

I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the system
afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently clear that private
tutors, natural history, science, and the modern languages, were the
appli