Page:Tex; a chapter in the life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (IA texchapterinlife00mcke).pdf/26

 earlier period. Coming from Amsterdam to London in 1874 at the age of nine, the son of a Dutch father and an English mother, Teixeira placed himself under instruction with Monsignor Capel and was received into the Holy Roman Catholic Church. In blood, faith and nationality, the Dutch Protestant of Portuguese-Jewish extraction had thus passed through many vicissitudes before he married an Irish wife, became a British citizen and died a Catholic. Traces of the Jew survived in his appearance; of the Dutchman in his speech; and his intellectual and racial mixed ancestry was betrayed by a cosmopolitan outlook. Ignorant of many prejudices that are the native Briton's birthright, he remained ever aloof from the passions of British thought and speech. If he respected, at least he could not share the conventional enthusiasms nor associate himself with the con-*