Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/82

 that he never had any. His father was a very "Low" or Evangelical Churchman,—a teetotaler, too, for many years,—who dreaded the contaminating influences of university life on his boys more than he coveted for them academic distinctions. What happened, accordingly, I cannot better describe than in the words of Sir Wilfrid's brother William, the author of "Ten Years of Gentleman Farming," a singularly candid and interesting book. "I had the advantage," he says, "of being the son of parents who were more anxious that their children should be happy and good than that they should be learned or great. My father had my education conducted—in a religious manner—at home, where I acquired a little Latin and Greek, and a few other things; and where, as is the case with many other youths, any thing in the shape of lessons was not attractive to me, and 1 learned as little as possible. I had, before I was eighteen, travelled several times on the continent of Europe, and had visited Egypt and Palestine; but circumstances never brought me in contact with rich or great people, and I had not much of what is called 'knowledge of the world;' nor, as I always had the prospect of enough wealth to enable me to live without working, did I form what are called 'business habits,' Trained as a shooter of animals, a hunter of Cumberland beasts with hounds, and a trapper of vermin, I found myself in the spring of 1861, in my twenty-fifth year, without an occupation, without many acquaintances,—except among the poor, whom I had not learned to despise because they spoke bad grammar, and took their coats off to work,—and without the reputation of having been successful in any undertaking except that of the mastership and huntsmanship of my brother's foxhounds."