his
retirement from Norwich, because I could ill brook his observation of my
increasing debility of mind." This chosen companion of William Taylor
must himself have been no ordinary man; and he was the friend besides of
Borrow, whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire for
popular distinction, lived privately, married a daughter of Dr. Enfield
of Enfield's "Speaker," and devoted his time to the education of his
family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, and with certain traits
of stoicism, that would surprise a modern. From these children we must
single out his youngest daughter, Eliza, who learned under his care to
be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without
outward sign after the manner of the Godwin school. This was the more
notable, as the girl really derived from the Enfields, whose high-flown
romantic temper I wish I could find space to illustrate. She was but
seven years old when Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her;
and the union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband
and wife differed, and they did so on momentous subjects, they differed
with perfect temper and content; and in the conduct of life, and in
depth and durability of love, they were at one. Each full of high
spirits, each practised something of the same repression: no sharp word
was uttered in their house. The same point of honour ruled them: a guest
was sacred and stood within the pale from criticism. It was a house,
besides, of unusual intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the
early days of the marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and
Alfred, marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and
"reasoning high" till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they would
cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea. And
though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were
separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at Brandeston, and
John already near his end in the "rambling old house" at Weybridge,
Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much intellectual
society, and still, as indeed they remained until the last, youthfully
alert in mind. There was but one child of the marriage, Annie, and she
was herself something new for the eyes of the young visitor; brought up
as she had been, like her mother before her, to the standard of a man's
acquirements. Only one art had she been denied, she must not learn the
vi