ad long and frank discussions. This
daring youth doubted the story of Noah's flood, and one phrase which
stuck in his brother's mind is significant. 'You,' he said, 'are a good
boy, and I suppose you will go to heaven. If you can enjoy yourself
there when you think of me and my like grilling in hell fire, upon my
soul I don't envy you.' One other little glance from a point of view
other than that of Clapham impressed the lad. He found among his
father's books a copy of 'State Trials,' and there read the trial of
Williams for publishing Paine's 'Age of Reason.' The extracts from Paine
impressed him; though, for a time, he had an impression from his father
that Coleridge and other wise men had made a satisfactory apology for
the Bible; and 'in his inexperience' he thought that Paine's coarseness
implied a weak case. 'There is a great deal of truth,' he says, 'in a
remark made by Paine. I have gone through the Bible as a man might go
through a wood, cutting down the trees. The priests can stick them in
again, but they will not make them grow.' For the present such thoughts
remained without result. Fitzjames was affected, he says, by the
combined influence of his father and brother. He thought that something
was to be said on both sides of the argument. Meanwhile the anxiety
caused to his father by Herbert's unfortunately broken, though in no
sense discreditable, career impressed him with a strong sense of the
evils of all irregularities of conduct. He often remembered Herbert in
connection with one of his odd anniversaries. 'This day eighteen years
ago,' he says (September 16, 1857), 'my brother Herbert and I killed a
snake in Windsor Forest. Poor dear fellow! we should have been great
friends, and please God! we shall be yet.'

Meanwhile Fitzjames had done well, though not brilliantly, at school. He
was eighth in his division, of which he gives the first twelve names
from memory. The first boy was Chenery, afterwards editor of the
'Times,' and the twelfth was Herbert Coleridge. With the exception of
Coleridge, his cousin Arthur, and W. J. Beamont (1828-1868), who at his
death was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had hardly any
intimates. Chitty, afterwards his colleague on the Bench, was then
famous as an athlete; but with athletics my brother had nothing to do.
His only amusement of that kind was the solitary sport of fishing. He
caught a few roach and dace, and vainly endeavoured to inveigle pike.
His failure