Augustus Austen Leigh, Provost of King's College, Cambridge

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: usually talkative, but showing, even in his nursery days, a turn for fun and mimicry which they found extremely entertaining. Though he never mimicked in later life, it was probably not that he could not, but that he would not do so; indeed, he refused to go on with it while still a child. He may have been...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: usually talkative, but showing, even in his nursery days, a turn for fun and mimicry which they found extremely entertaining. Though he never mimicked in later life, it was probably not that he could not, but that he would not do so; indeed, he refused to go on with it while still a child. He may have been told of its dangers, and to so tender a conscience as his this may have been sufficient to make him regard it as wrong. To all serious teaching he was a most attentive and obedient listener, and habits thus formed, almost in infancy, became to him so completely a second nature that it might easily have been supposed he had been born free from the faults to be found in most children, and that Wordsworth's description had been written to meet his case. Not only was ' the child the father of the man, ' but his days were, as certainly, ' bound each to each by natural piety.' He always regarded his home as a very happy one. The aim of his parents was to be equally affectionate and just to all their children, without allowing themselves to show, or to feel, individual preferences; and the experience of such a home, where no one is given undue prominence, but all are expected to obey authority and to give and take among themselves, may be as good a preparation as can be found in any private school for fitting boys to enter the larger world of Eton or Harrow. In this case it served also to provide a plentiful store of happy memories for after life. Augustus, as the sixth son, belonged to the trio of younger brothers long known to their elders as ' the little boys, ' the other members of the trio being his next elder brother Edward, to whom he looked like a twin in size, and, at a greater distance of age, his youngest brother Willie. The last- named was at this time too young t.