100 PRÆTERITA-I

much impressed on my mind, partly by the pretty view from the windows; but more, because while my orthodox breakfast, even in travelling, was of stale baker’s bread, at these starry picnics I was allowed new French roll.

114. Leaving Dr. Grant, for the nonce,¹ under these pleasant and dignifiedly crescent circumstances, I must turn to the friends who of all others, not relatives, were most powerfully influential on my child life,-Mr. and Mrs. Richard Gray.

Some considerable time during my father’s clerkdom had been passed by him in Spain, in learning to know sherry, and seeing the ways of making and storing it at Xerez, Cadiz, and Lisbon. At Lisbon he became intimate with another young Scotsman of about his own age, also employed, I conceive, as a clerk, in some Spanish house, but himself of no narrow clerkly mind. On the contrary, Richard Gray went far beyond my father in the romantic sentiment, and scholarly love of good literature, which so strangely mingled with my father’s steady business habits. Equally energetic, industrious, and high-principled, Mr. Gray’s enthusiasm was nevertheless irregularly, and too often uselessly, coruscant; being to my father’s, as Carlyle says of French against English fire at Dettingen, “faggot against anthracite.”² Yet, I will not venture absolutely to maintain that, under Richard’s erratic and effervescent influence, an expedition to Cintra, or an assistance at a village festa, or even at a bull-fight, might not sometimes, to that extent, invalidate my former general assertion that, during nine years, my father never had a holiday.³ At all events, the young men became close and affectionate friends; and the connection had a softening, cheering, and altogether beneficent effect on my father’s character. Nor was their brotherly friendship any whit flawed or dimmed, when, a little while before leaving Spain, Mr. Gray married an extremely good and beautiful Scotch girl, Mary Monro.

¹ [For further mention of him, see ii. § 5 (p. 246).]

² [See Friedrich, Book xiv. ch. v.]

³ [See above, p. 27 (§ 26).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]