132 THE STORY OF MY LIFE [1843-
Aunt Lucy and the Maurices had long urged my mother to send me to school, and perhaps in many ways my terrible fits of naughtiness made it desirable, though they chiefly arose from nervousness, caused by the incessant " nagging" I received at home from every one except my mother and Lea. But the choice of the school to which I was sent at nine years old was very unfortunate. When illness had obliged my Uncle Augustus Hare to leave his beloved little parish of Alton Barnes for Italy, a Eev. Robert Kilvert came thither as his temporary curate,—-a very religious man, deeply learned in ultra " evangelical" divinity,, but strangely unpractical and with no knowledge whatever of the world, — still less of the boyish part of it. As Dr. John Brown once said, " The grace of God can do muckle, but it canna gie a man common-sense.'7 Mr. Kilvert was a good scholar, but in the dryest, hardest sense; of literature he knew nothing,, and he was entirely without originality or cleverness, so that his knowledge was of the most untempting description. Still his letters to my mother in her early widowhood had been a great comfort to her, and there was no doubt of his having been a thoroughly good parish-priest. He had lately married a Miss Coleman, who derived the strange name of Ther-imithis, from the daughter of Pharaoh, who saved Moses out of the bulrushes; and he had opened a small school at his tiny Rectory of Hardenhnish, or, as it was generally called, Harnish, the estate of the Clutterbucks, near Chippenham in Wiltshire; so iny mother, thinking it of far more importance to select " a good man " than " a good master," determined toed the gipsies as his intermediaries. through, the hot lanes. I always liked this expedition and scram-is a safe punishment for naughtiness, more safe, I think, than giving a reward for goodness. c If you are naughty I must punish you,' is often a necessary threat: but it is not good to hold out ad (J<><1 to forgive him for !*'in^ so nau^Imhr- and the most attractive in Florence. thru