09

XIV. SERVICE 338

XV. ECCLESIASTICA 365

FIFTEEN CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

I

BEGINNINGS

One look back--as we hurry o'er the plain,
Man's years speeding us along--
One look back! From the hollow past again,
Youth, come flooding into song!
Tell how once, in the breath of summer air,
Winds blew fresher than they blow;
Times long hid, with their triumph and their care,
Yesterday--many years ago!
E. E. BOWEN.

The wayfarer who crosses Lincoln's Inn Fields perceives in the midst of
them a kind of wooden temple, and passes by it unmoved. But, if his
curiosity tempts him to enter it, he sees, through an aperture in the
boarded floor, a slab of stone bearing this inscription:

"On this spot was beheaded
William Lord Russell,
A lover of constitutional liberty,
21st July, A.D. 1683."[1]

Of the martyr thus temperately eulogized I am the
great-great-great-great-grandson, and I agree with The Antiquary, that
"it's a shame to the English language that we have not a less clumsy way
of expressing a relationship of which we have occasion to think and
speak so frequently."

Before we part company with my ill-fated ancestor, let me tell a story
bearing on his historical position. When my father was a cornet in the
Blues, he invited a brother-officer to spend some of his leave at Woburn
Abbey. One day, when the weather was too bad for any kind of sport, the
visitor was induced to have a look at the pictures. The Rembrandts, and
Cuyps, and Van Dykes and Sir Joshuas bored him to extremity, but
accidentally his eye lit on Hayter's famous picture of Lord Russell's
trial, and, with a sudden gleam of intelligence, he exclaimed, "Hullo!
What's this? It looks like a trial." My father answered, with modest
pride--"It is a trial--the trial of my ancestor, William, Lord Russell."
"Good heavens! my dear fellow--an ancestor of yours tried? What a
shocking thing! _I hope he got off._"

So much for our Family Martyr.

In analysing one's nationality, it is natural to regard one's four
grand-parents as one's component parts. Tried by this test, I am half an
Englishman, one quarter a Highlander, and one quarter a Welshman, for my
father's father was wholly English; my father's mother wholly Scotch; my
mother's father wholly Welsh; and my mother's mother wholly Eng