founded the Home and Colonial Training Schools in London, besides forwarding the Colonial and Continental Church Society, African Missions, the Malta College, the London City Mission, and various other religious enterprises. He started in 1823 and maintained for many years an efficient infant school at Fulham, and in 1828 with a few friends, Mr. Reynolds established the Record newspaper, and for more than forty years promoted its welfare. On a somewhat different line Mr. Reynolds was also an authority. He was a first-rate judge of a horse. Walter Bagehot never bought one without consulting "my Uncle Reynolds".

While studying law in London, Walter Bagehot paid various visits to Oxford, staying with his friend Constantine Prichard, a fellow of Balliol. There he came under the influence of John Henry Newman, whose Anglican sermons he admired enormously. Stuckey Coles, well known as one of the leading lights among Anglicans, was his cousin, and established and

to the Irish Revenue Commission of 1822-3, he had a large share in reconstituting the fiscal system of that country; later on he was one of the heads of the Commissariat Department, combining with that office two, if not three others. . . . Of this long career of active public life the culminating point may be dated at 1823, at which time the path of ambition seemed to present itself to Mr. Reynolds in no common degree. His exertions and abilities had attracted the notice of an influential nobleman, who offered him a seat in Parliament, and the whole career of high office appeared to open before him. But at that very juncture, a sermon preached at a village church near Dublin by the friend who has lived to commit his remains to the grave, so impressed him with a sense of the spiritual dangers almost certain to wait on worldly advancement-at all events in his own case-that he at once resolved never again to take a step for the furtherance of his temporal interests. On this resolution he received the Lord's Supper before leaving the Church, and during the remaining fifty years of his life he never recurred to that occasion without an expression of devout thankfulness to Him who inspired the vow and gave him grace rightly to keep it. . . . Mr. Reynolds married in 1819, Mary Anne, eldest daughter of Robert Bagehot, Esq., of Herd's Hill, near Langport, Somerset, and in her endeared society and co-operation found, for more than forty years, an unfailing support. A monument in the form of the Reynolds Memorial Schools was erected when he died in 1874 in connection with the Home and Colonial Training Schools in London."— Memoir of John Reynolds by "A Friend".

supported a centre for Anglican priests at Shepton Beauchamp, eight miles from Herd's Hill, where his father was the Squarson". At the age of sixteen Walter Bagehot went to University College in London, and there met his life-long friend, Richard Hutton, who at that time intended to become a Unitarian Minister, as his father had been before him. Mr. Hutton and Walter Bagehot kept up a constant correspondence, the subjects of many of their letters being Moral Philosophy and Religion. Theology never took a more prominent part in any layman's life of thought than it did in that of Walter Bagehot's, and few divines have mastered their Bible more thoroughly than he did, thanks to his mother's insistent teaching.

As will be seen in the following letter written by his father while the family was at Blue Anchor spending the usual holiday by the sea, Walter early began to try his hand at poetry.

(Addressed) MASTER WALTER BAGEHOT, BLUE ANCHOR

(aged 7).

“LANGPORT,

"17th June, 1833.

"MY DEAR BOY,

"I cannot let Miss Jones go without thanking you for your letter. letter. I assure you I wish myself back again with you very much indeed and should be glad to hear the sound of the dashing waves and to climb the rocks and brave the deep and journey about with Mamma and you picking spicata --but I must not think of it yet, for little or great boys must not be idle either, and I must do my work before I play. The mail with its four horses soon took me away from you on Friday and carried me through a very pretty country to Taunton where Bob was waiting for me and brought me home just about the time of your fifth dip as I calculated.

"Mamma tells me you are becoming a poet and I shall look forward some day or other to our having a 'Sir Walter' in our own family.

"Your sword is sent, and as to-morrow is the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, I suppose you will be very grand on

the occasion. How would you have liked living at Brussels when the cannons began to roar and the soldiers were summoned to the field?

"I must close directly as Miss Jones is just going off in

the phaeton."

This said sword played an active part in Walter's life at that time. He would use it at Herd's Hill to lash off the heads of flowers with terrible force, imagining himself the leader of hosts and the demolisher of thousands and ten thousands of the Saracens. He lived much in his imagination, and his mother and aunt, Mrs. Michell, who when a widow lived constantly at Herd's Hill, recounted to us many of his exploits as a child while led by its inspirations. His serious education began at the age of eight or nine as a day scholar under the teaching of the notable Mr. Quekett, for fifty-six years the able master of the anciently endowed Langport Grammar School, still flourishing in the old building, half way up the Hill of Langport. During the last year when Walter attended this school, he wrote to his mother while she was visiting her brother in Sloane Street the following letter

"18th May, 1838.

"We are all going on very well without you, and Papa and I have such nice chats about Sir R. Peel and the little Queen. Papa has quite made up his mind since he had read our friend the Duke's speech that the Queen did quite right and blames 'the Right Hon. Baronet' for making the ladies of so much consequence since they could only use the ladies' privilege' of railing against everybody and everything. I have done my lessons most days and of course find I cannot do them nearly as well without you, particularly the French. Remember my French dictionary. Do you think I ever can survive two days' holidays without you? I think I may say possibly; but I suppose, or rather am certain, that I shall miss you very much. I have read the review of Doctor Cumming's work in the Monthly, and like him much better since I find he thinks Egypt a delightful country and advises some persons to go out with the intention of building a boarding-house for the

sick, travellers, etc. I hope some one will take his advice. I have some thoughts of spending a month or two there!

"And now, my dear Mamma, I must conclude with entreating you to remember that everywhere you carry the thought of your affectionate son,

"WALTER BAGEHOT.

"Excuse bad writing for, as Jenny Deans says, I have 'but one and ill pen "."

Later in the year Mrs. Bagehot visits her sister-in-law, Mrs. Reynolds, at Hampstead, and Walter writes:

"This day is the first of November. Oh, how different from the last two! The comparison makes me feel so happy that you are not gone away ill. I am in a great deal better spirits since Papa came home. I know it ought not to be so,

but I can't help it.

"The water has got up into the Moor which occasions great commotions in the school for fear it will be too wet to have a bonfire and let off fireworks. T. Paul surmises that they have let the water in because the boys shall not have a bonfire; but the fact wants confirmation, he having, as I can learn, no authority for it but his own thoughts. I have to write the Life of Alfred the Great for Papa. I find it rather difficult, more so I think than the Battle of Mantinea. I have read his reign in Hume who doesn't of course breath a syllable about religion but praises him most extremely on account of his improvements in the English Law and Literature."

To his Papa, he writes:

"Since you have told me to give an account of the battle of Marathon in my own words, I will do it to the best of my ability."

Then follows a short but excellent account of the battle. On 8th October, 1838, again he writes:

"MY DEAR PAPA,

"I will now, as you requested, attempt, and I hope to your satisfaction, the Life of Alfred (justly surnamed the Great). I shall consider Alfred in his double character of a prince and scholar, and to render his reign intelligible I shall give a short account of the Anglo-Saxons down to that time." Whereupon follows a very long essay full of instruction. On 13th October, 1838, he writes :

"Since you were pleased with my account of the battle of Marathon, I will try to succeed better in that of Mantinea." On 25th November, he writes :

"I will now attempt the life of St. Augustine of Hippo. This bulwark of orthodoxy was born at Tagaste, a town in Africa."

A very long account of the life of the Saint follows. On 18th December, 1838, he writes:

"My letter to Mamma contained, as you know, an account of St. Augustine; this one will contain a brief" (not very brief) "life of Julius Caesar."

To finish up this course of six essays he writes a very lengthy one to his Mamma :

"This letter will contain an account of Socrates."

All six essays, written in three months, are remarkable as the work of a boy of twelve. Walter Bagehot had already learned how to read, in itself an art, also he had learned how to grip the main points of his subject, and could manage his detail with creditable skill,

It may be thought that too much space has been accorded to Walter Bagehot's birthplace, earlier life, home and family, but in order to convey a true likeness of him, I feel the aid of his surroundings from his childhood must be enlisted. His genius singled him out from his belongings; but that genius was moulded very directly by the atmosphere of his home life, and by the characters of his relations. Unlike many distinguished men who pass out into the world from their early home into a new atmosphere of feeling and associations,