n habits of the most familiar intercourse with us. With
them was associated John Austin, regarded by all the Utilitarians as the
profoundest of jurists and famous for his conversational powers; and
Mrs. Austin, a literary lady, with her daughter, afterwards Lady Duff
Gordon. I think of her (though it makes me feel old when I so think) as
Lucy Austin. She was a brilliant girl, reported to keep a rifle and a
skull in her bedroom. She once startled the sense of propriety of her
elders by performing in our house a charade, in which she represented a
dying woman with a 'realism'--to use the modern phrase--worthy of Madame
Sarah Bernhardt. Other visitors were occasionally attracted. My father
knew John Mill, though never, I fancy, at all intimately. He knew
politicians such as Charles Greville, the diarist, who showed his
penetration characteristically, as I have been told, by especially
admiring my mother as a model of the domestic virtues which he could
appreciate from an outside point of view.

We looked, however, at the world from a certain distance, and, as it
were, through a veil. My father had little taste for general society. It
had once been intimated to him, as he told me, that he might find
admission to the meetings of Holland House, where, as Macaulay tells us,
you might have the privilege of seeing Mackintosh verify a reference to
Thomas Aquinas, and hearing Talleyrand describe his ride over the field
of Austerlitz. My father took a different view. He declined to take
advantage of this opening into the upper world, because, as he said, I
don't know from what experience, the conversation turned chiefly upon
petty personal gossip. The feasts of the great were not to his taste. He
was ascetic by temperament. He was, he said, one of the few people to
whom it was the same thing to eat a dinner and to perform an act of
self-denial. In fact, for many years he never ate a dinner, contenting
himself with a biscuit and a glass of sherry as lunch, and an egg at
tea, and thereby, as the doctors said, injuring his health. He once
smoked a cigar, and found it so delicious that he never smoked again. He
indulged in snuff until one day it occurred to him that snuff was
superfluous; when the box was solemnly emptied out of the window and
never refilled. Long sittings after dinner were an abomination to him,
and he spoke with horror of his father's belief in the virtues of port
wine. His systematic abstemiousness diminished any tem