MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which
are so much more important than all others, are also the most
complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to
completeness. Without attempting the hopeless task of detailing the
circumstances by which, in this respect, my early character may have
been shaped, I shall confine myself to a few leading points, which
form an indispensable part of any true account of my education.
I was brought up from the first without any religious belief, in the
ordinary acceptation of the term. My father, educated in the creed of
Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been
early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation, but the
foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion. I have heard
him say, that the turning point of his mind on the subject was reading
Butler's _Analogy_. That work, of which he always continued to speak
with respect, kept him, as he said, for some considerable time, a
believer in the divine authority of Christianity; by proving to him
that whatever are the difficulties in believing that the Old and New
Testaments proceed from, or record the acts of, a perfectly wise and
good being, the same and still greater difficulties stand in the way
of the belief, that a being of such a character can have been the
Maker of the universe. He considered Butler's argument as conclusive
against the only opponents for whom it was intended. Those who admit
an omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent maker and ruler
of such a world as this, can say little against Christianity but what
can, with at least equal force, be retorted against themselves.
Finding, therefore, no halting place in Deism, he remained in a state
of perplexity, until, doubtless after many struggles, he yielded to
the conviction, that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever
can be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion; for
dogmatic atheism he looked upon as absurd; as most of those, whom the
world has considered Atheists, have always done. These particulars are
important, because they show that my father's rejection of all that is
called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a
matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more
than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so
full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with
perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the
subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open
contradiction. The Sabaean, or Manichaean theory of a Good and an Evil
Principle, struggling against each other for the government of the
universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him
express surprise, that no one revived it in our time. He would have
regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed to it no
depraving influence. As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense
usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of
Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental
delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest
enemy of morality: first, by setting up fictitious excellences--belief
in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the
good of human-kind--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes
for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the
standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being,
on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in
sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. I have a hundred times
heard him say that all ages and nations have represented their gods as
wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone
on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect
conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have
called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This _ne plus
ultra_ of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly
presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think (he used to
say) of a being who would make a Hell--who would create the human race
with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention,
that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and
everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is drawing near when this
dreadful conception of an object of worship will be no longer
identified with Christianity; and when all persons, with any sense of
moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with
which my father regarded it. My father was as well aware as anyone
that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing
consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or
to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same
slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears,
wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving
a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical
consequences of the theory. Such is the facility with which mankind
believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another,
and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any
consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that
multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author
of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the best
conception they were able to form of perfect goodness. Their worship
was not paid to the demon which such a being as they imagined would
really be, but to their own ideal of excellence. The evil is, that
such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes the most
obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it
higher. Believers shrink from every train of ideas which would lead
the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of excellence,
because they feel (even when they do not distinctly see) that such a
standard would conflict with many of the dispensations of nature, and
with much of what they are accustomed to consider as the Christian
creed. And thus morality continues a matter of blind tradition, with
no consistent principle, nor even any consistent feeling, to guide it.
It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father's ideas of duty,
to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and
feelings respecting religion: and he impressed upon me from the first,
that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject
on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot
be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information
from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty
a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself,
"Who made God?" He, at the same time, took care that I should be
acquainted with what had been thought by mankind on these impenetrable
problems. I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of
ecclesiastical history; and he taught me to take the strongest interest
in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest against priestly
tyranny for liberty of thought.
I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has
not thrown off religious belief, but never had it: I grew up in a
negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern exactly as
I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned
me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe
what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done
so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar
to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact. This point in my
early education had, however, incidentally one bad consequence deserving
notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father
thought it necessary to give it as one which could not prudently be avowed
to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself, at that early
age, was attended with some moral disadvantages; though my limited
intercourse with strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to
me on religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of
avowal or hypocrisy. I remember two occasions in my boyhood, on which I
felt myself in this alternative, and in both cases I avowed my disbelief
and defended it. My opponents were boys, considerably older than myself:
one of them I certainly staggered at the time, but the subject was never
renewed between us: the other who was surprised and somewhat shocked, did
his best to convince me for some time, without effect.
The great advance in liberty of discussion, which is one of the most
important differences between the present time and that of my childhood,
has greatly altered the moralities of this question; and I think that
few men of my father's intellect and public spirit, holding with such
intensity of moral conviction as he did, unpopular opinions on religion,
or on any other of the great subjects of thought, would now either
practise or inculcate the withholding of them from the world, unless in
the cases, becoming fewer every day, in which frankness on these subjects
would either risk the loss of means of subsistence, or would amount to
exclusion from some sphere of usefulness peculiarly suitable to the
capacities of the individual. On religion in particular the time appears
to me to have come when it is the duty of all who, being qualified in
point of knowledge, have on mature consideration satisfied themselves
that the current opinions are not only false but hurtful, to make their
dissent known; at least, if they are among those whose station or
reputation gives their opinion a chance of being attended to. Such an
avowal would put an end, at once and for ever, to the vulgar prejudice,
that what is called, very improperly, unbelief, is connected with any
bad qualities either of mind or heart. The world would be astonished if
it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments--of those most
distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue--are
complete sceptics in religion; many of them refraining from avowal, less
from personal considerations than from a conscientious, though now in my
opinion a most mistaken, apprehension, lest by speaking out what would
tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by consequence (as they suppose)
existing restraints, they should do harm instead of good.
Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many
species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best
among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them
will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, in the best
sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to
themselves the title. The liberality of the age, or in other words the
weakening of the obstinate prejudice which makes men unable to see
what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations,
has caused it be very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly
religious: but if religion stands for any graces of character and not
for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief
is far short of Deism. Though they may think the proof incomplete that
the universe is a work of design, and though they assuredly disbelieve
that it can have an Author and Governor who is _absolute_ in power as
well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the
principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a
Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their
conscience; and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection
than the objective Deity of those who think themselves obliged to find
absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering
and so deformed by injustice as ours.
My father's moral convictions, wholly dissevered from religion, were
very much of the character of those of the Greek philosophers; and
were delivered with the force and decision which characterized all
that came from him. Even at the very early age at which I read with
him the _Memorabilia_ of Xenophon, I imbibed from that work and from
his comments a deep respect for the character of Socrates; who stood
in my mind as a model of ideal excellence: and I well remember how my
father at that time impressed upon me the lesson of the "Choice of
Hercules." At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard
exhibited in the writings of Plato operated upon me with great force.
My father's moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the
"Socratici viri"; justice, temperance (to which he gave a very
extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter
pain and especially labour; regard for the public good; estimation of
persons according to their merits, and of things according to their
intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one of
self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed
in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation,
or stern reprobation and contempt.
But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more; and
the effect my father produced on my character, did not depend solely
on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still
more, on what manner of man he was.
In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the
Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of
the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His
standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian,
taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of
actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the
Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later
years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. He was
not insensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the
price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid
for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to
be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly,
temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers
--stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences--was
with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational
precept. His inculcations of this virtue fill a large place in my
childish remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing at best,
after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.
This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may
be supposed, in the presence of young persons: but when he did, it
was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes
say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and
good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with
anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in
rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as
pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of
the benevolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to
say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were
able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and
bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct--of acts and omissions;
there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead,
either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to
act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying
out the doctrine that the object of praise and blame should be the
discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right, he
refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the
agent. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action, when the
motive was a feeling of duty, as if the agents had been consciously
evil doers. He would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for
inquisitors, that they sincerely believed burning heretics to be an
obligation of conscience. But though he did not allow honesty of purpose
to soften his disapprobation of actions, it had its full effect on his
estimation of characters. No one prized conscientiousness and rectitude
of intention more highly, or was more incapable of valuing any person
in whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he disliked people quite
as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely
to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad
cause, as much as or more than one who adopted the same cause from
self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically
mischievous. And thus, his aversion to many intellectual errors, or what
he regarded as such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a
moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in a degree once common,
but now very unusual, threw his feelings into his opinions; which truly
it is difficult to understand how anyone who possesses much of both, can
fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions will confound
this with intolerance. Those who, having opinions which they hold to be
immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful,
have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as
a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right,
and right what they think wrong: though they need not therefore be, nor
was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed
in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead
of by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person,
being no more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people
on account of opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither
himself does them any ill office, nor connives at its being donc by
others, he is not intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a
conscientious sense of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom
of all opinions, is the only tolerance which is commendable, or, to the
highest moral order of minds, possible.
It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, and the character,
above described, was likely to leave a strong moral impression on any
mind principally formed by him, and that his moral teaching was not
likely to err on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element which
was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that
of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own
nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually
showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever
developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs
of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the
feelings themselves. If we consider further that he was in the trying
position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was
constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for
a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who
would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been
constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.
This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger
children. They loved him tenderly: and if I cannot say so much of
myself, I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own
education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or
gainer by his severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a
happy childhood. And I do not believe that boys can be induced to
apply themselves with vigour, and--what is so much more
difficult--perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force
of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be
learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability
to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very
laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of
what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them.
But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them
to learn anything _but_ what has been made easy and interesting, one
of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the
decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which,
however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new,
as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable
of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then,
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with;
but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it
predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of
the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of
after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and
spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for
which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and
intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.
During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my
father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little
known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently
to be met with then as since), inclined him to cultivate; and his
conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction.
My being an habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted
with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent
countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young
persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy,
invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on
the subject. I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 1818)
to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and
having been, I rather think, a younger schoolfellow or college
companion of his, had on returning from India renewed their youthful
acquaintance, and who--coming, like many others, greatly under the
influence of my father's intellect and energy of character--was
induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there
adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in
the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to
the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not
know how soon after my father's first arrival in England they became
acquainted. But my father was the earliest Englishman of any great
mark, who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's
general views of ethics, government and law: and this was a natural
foundation for sympathy between them, and made them familiar
companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much
fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr.
Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in a
beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and
there I each summer accompanied my father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr.
Bentham, my father, and I made an excursion, which included Oxford,
Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I
saw many things which were instructive to me, and acquired my first
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of fondness for a
"view." In the succeeding winter we moved into a house very near Mr.
Bentham's, which my father rented from him, in Queen Square,
Westminster. From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived during half of each
year at Ford Abbey, in Somersetshire (or rather in a part of
Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the
advantage of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, an
important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to
nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free
character of their habitations. The middle-age architecture, the
baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old
place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English
middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence,
and were to me a sort of poetic cultivation, aided also by the
character of the grounds in which the Abbey stood; which were _riant_
and secluded, umbrageous, and full of the sound of falling waters.
I owed another of the fortunate circumstances in my education, a
year's residence in France, to Mr. Bentham's brother, General Sir
Samuel Bentham. I had seen Sir Samuel Bentham and his family at their
house near Gosport in the course of the tour already mentioned (he
being then Superintendent of the Dockyard at Portsmouth), and during a
stay of a few days which they made at Ford Abbey shortly after the
Peace, before going to live on the Continent. In 1820 they invited me
for a six months' visit to them in the South of France, which their
kindness ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth. Sir Samuel
Bentham, though of a character of mind different from that of his
illustrious brother, was a man of very considerable attainments and
general powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art. His wife, a
daughter of the celebrated chemist, Dr. Fordyce, was a woman of strong
will and decided character, much general knowledge, and great
practical good sense of the Edgeworth kind: she was the ruling spirit
of the household, as she deserved, and was well qualified, to be.
Their family consisted of one son (the eminent botanist) and three
daughters, the youngest about two years my senior. I am indebted to
them for much and various instruction, and for an almost parental
interest in my welfare. When I first joined them, in May, 1820, they
occupied the Château of Pompignan (still belonging to a descendant of
Voltaire's enemy) on the heights overlooking the plain of the Garonne
between Montauban and Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to
the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at Bagnères de
Bigorre, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and Bagnères de Luchon, and an
ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre.
This first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made
the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through
life. In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain route of
Castres and St. Pons, from Toulouse to Montpellier, in which last
neighbourhood Sir Samuel had just bought the estate of Restinclière,
near the foot of the singular mountain of St. Loup. During this
residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge of the French
language, and acquaintance with the ordinary French literature; I took
lessons in various bodily exercises, in none of which, however, I made
any proficiency; and at Montpellier I attended the excellent winter
courses of lectures at the Faculté des Sciences, those of M. Anglada
on chemistry, of M. Provençal on zoology, and of a very accomplished
representative of the eighteenth century metaphysics, M. Gergonne, on
logic, under the name of Philosophy of the Sciences. I also went
through a course of the higher mathematics under the private tuition
of M. Lenthéric, a professor at the Lycée of Montpellier. But the
greatest, perhaps, of the many advantages which I owed to this episode
in my education, was that of having breathed for a whole year, the
free and genial atmosphere of Continental life. This advantage was not
the less real though I could not then estimate, nor even consciously
feel it. Having so little experience of English life, and the few
people I knew being mostly such as had public objects, of a large and
personally disinterested kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low
moral tone of what, in England, is called society; the habit of, not
indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode of
implication, that conduct is of course always directed towards low and
petty objects; the absence of high feelings which manifests itself by
sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general
abstinence (except among a few of the stricter religionists) from
professing any high principles of action at all, except in those
preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the
costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or
estimate the difference between this manner of existence, and that of
a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at all
events different; among whom sentiments, which by comparison at least
may be called elevated, are the current coin of human intercourse,
both in books and in private life; and though often evaporating in
profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant
exercise, and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and
active part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and to be
recognised and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the
general culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual
exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most
uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a degree
not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except where an
unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the
intellect on questions of right and wrong. I did not know the way in
which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things
of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and
there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to
themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes
both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain
undeveloped, or to develop themselves only in some single and very
limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to
a kind of negative existence. All these things I did not perceive till
long afterwards; but I even then felt, though without stating it
clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and
amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of
existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or
no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true,
the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national
character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in
ordinary intercourse, than in England: but the general habit of the
people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the
opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper
or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.
In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time
in the house of M. Say, the eminent political economist, who was a
friend and correspondent of my father, having become acquainted with
him on a visit to England a year or two after the Peace. He was a man
of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the
best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the
knee to Bonaparte though courted by him to do so; a truly upright,
brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made
happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with
many of the chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various noteworthy
persons while staying at this house; among whom I have pleasure in the
recollection of having once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder
either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever
original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw,
was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of
which I ever afterwards kept myself _au courant_, as much as of
English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with
Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development,
keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England--and from
which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not
exempt--of judging universal questions by a merely English standard.
After passing a few weeks at Caen with an old friend of my father's,
I returned to England in July, 1821 and my education resumed its
ordinary course.