An Autobiography of an Ancient Athlete & Antiquarian

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 13 (a house he bad bought for bis daughters Elizabeth and M. A. C. Rye, who did not live in it long), and died there on the 8th December, 1876, and was buried at Kensal Green. By his will be left all his property to his widow absolutely. 1 He was a man of wide and varied reading, but singularly enough never printed a line, though he is credited with having been (in conjunction with his friend Bramwell, to whom he gave his first brief, and who was my godfather) the draftsman of the Common Law Procedure Act, and I have a portion of a MS. Comedy by him which has considerable merit. As a lawyer he had a very high local reputation, in fact wasted much of his own time in looking up points for bis neighbour solicitors, and gratuitously advising them in difficult cases. He enjoyed a fair practice for some years, but lost much of it by his morbid fear of contingencies, and indeed towards the end of his life took a pessimist view of politics and of his profession, and declined to act for bis clients except in the simplest matters. Soured in early life by his unlucky partnership, and by losses on the Stock Exchange in the time of the railway mania, by which in effect he lost the whole of the com– petence left him by his father, he set to work to save enough so that bis children should have no cause to reproach him, and succeeded in leaving them practically the same amount. The process, however, was not a pleasant one to his family, though possibly it eventually benefited them by bringing them up to exercise care in money matters and not to expect comforts or high living. Three pf us sons were lodged in the top attics of No. 15, King's Parade, in rooms with9ut fireplaces, and through the faulty windows of which the snow drifted every year. Two -0f us survived this Spartan regime, but I have always thought that my brother Frank had the seeds of the consumption which killed him, laid by the hardships of living in a practically empty, carpetless house, in which a fire was only lit once a week, and that in the library. The abundance of books which filled every room, however, exercised a very good effect on all of us, and when quite 1 She·survived him and died in the same house on Friday, 10th February, 1882, at 4 p. rn., aud was also buried at Keusal Green•. By her will she divided her property equally among her cllildreu.