for myself, and to follow it as best I might with my tags and short-lengths of knowledge. And I was painfully aware that the scissors had been applied to my ideas and pursuits in my educative period, lest they should be too lengthy for that which was the object of my father, to make of me a mathematician, and nothing but a mathematician.
I had reached that period when I could say with Demea, in the Adelphi: "Never was there any person of ever such well-trained habits of life, but that experience and custom are ever bringing him somewhat new, or suggesting something; so much so, that what you believe you know you don't know; and what you have hitherto considered of supreme importance, upon making a trial of it you come to reject it. This is my case now." And with regard to the persistent efforts, at no little cost to himself, of my father to suppress my natural tendencies to classic, historical, and artistic pursuits, and to force me into a mathematical career, I may say with Philto in the Trinummus, and this quotation I will give in the original:
"Qui nihil aliud, nisi quod sibi soli placet,
Consulit advorsum filium, nugas agit."
(Act II, scene 3.)
My father proposed that I should go to Marlborough Grammar School as assistant master to my uncle, Frederick Bond, who was head master. I had a very high opinion of him, but I did not care to be in a school that was not definitely religious, and my uncle, though in deacon's Orders, never became a priest, which to me seemed to exhibit slackness.
So I slipped away to S. Barnabas, Pimlico, and offered myself as master to the Choir School. Lowder was then senior curate, and Skinner the vicar, but at the time the latter was in poor health, and the conduct of the services and the parochial visiting devolved on Lowder. There was a junior curate, Lyford.
Meanwhile, my parents did not know what had become of me, and were uneasy. However, I went occasionally to show myself to my grand-uncle, General Sabine, at the time President of the Royal Society. He took me one evening to a meeting of the society where was an exhibition of the carved bones, and other relics of early man, as discovered on the Vezere by Christy and
